In his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump pledged to crack down on illegal immigration: “All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” The administration set a minimum goal of 3,000 deportations per day.

There was a problem. At the time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated or contracted with more than 200 disparate facilities across the country, from federal detention centers to county jails, and it had the resources to detain only about 41,000 people at a time. To reach its daily deportation goal, the government would have to scale up its capacity. So this year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone on a real estate shopping spree, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on warehouses across the country. The plan: to transform them into detention centers for undocumented migrants.

It is inhumane to store human beings—people who in many cases have not been convicted or even accused of anything more serious than civil immigration violations—in warehouses like so much freight. It is also far too costly, both in tax dollars spent and in harms imposed on the communities where these holding centers are being built.

Congress Gave ICE $45 Billion To Build Detention Centers

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave ICE the money to hire 10,000 new immigration officers, plus $45 billion for “single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity.” A Homeland Security press release announced that this funding “provides ICE with enough detention capacity to maintain an average daily population of 100,000 illegal aliens and secures 80,000 new ICE beds.”

The department immediately started buying up industrial warehouses across America. According to DHS documents, the plan is to streamline operations to 34 dedicated facilities with a total detainee capacity of 92,600. This would include “the acquisition and renovation of eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites.” The processing sites would hold up to 1,500 detainees for a few days at a time. A blueprint in a DHS report shows elaborate centers with kitchens, cafeterias, laundry facilities, gun ranges, and housing for up to 10,000 detainees. Homeland Security claims these will be ready for use November 30.

 

The administration doesn’t like to call these facilities warehouses. They “are not warehouses—they are detention facilities,” recently departed DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Washington Post in January. An ICE spokesperson tells Reason that “these will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.” But no matter how they dress it up, ICE acquired industrial properties with empty warehouses designed to store and transport freight, with the intent to use them for storing and transporting people.

It’s not like ICE’s “regular detention standards” are anything to be proud of. There have been numerous reports across the country of inhumane conditions in ICE facilities. In just 50 days at Camp East Montana, a detention center at Fort Bliss, Texas, “migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention,” The Washington Post reported in September. Three detainees at the camp died within six weeks, and the Associated Press reported that the staff were taking “bets…over which detainee would be next to die by suicide.” In March, officials shut down access to Camp East Montana after 14 detainees tested positive for measles, before announcing a new contractor would take over.

It’s also worth noting that as of February 7, 2026, about 74 percent of the people held in ICE custody—50,259 out of 68,289 detainees—had no criminal convictions, despite Trump’s repeated pledge to go after the “worst of the worst.” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, similarly found that of all the people ICE detained from October 1 through November 15, 2025, only 5 percent had been convicted of a violent crime, 73 percent had no criminal convictions of any kind, and 47 percent had no charges pending either.

The Trump Administration Is Overpaying for ICE Real Estate

The warehouse detention centers won’t be cheap.

Take the facility that the DHS bought in Surprise, Arizona. It paid $70 million for the warehouse. The agency estimates that it’ll cost another $150 million to retrofit the building into a processing site, plus $180 million to operate it for its first three years. That’s $400 million for just one spot, projected to house up to 550 detainees at a time.

The feds have often paid more than the properties appear to be worth. In January and February alone, ICE “bought industrial space totaling more than 6.8 million square feet…for at least $894 million, often paying a premium for the real estate in the once white-hot U.S. industrial market that is now dealing with a downturn in demand,” reports CoStar. “ICE appears to be paying an 11% to 13% premium, with some properties trading at over 30% of recent comparable trades in the market.” That $70 million warehouse in Surprise? The tax assessor gave it a valuation of $46 million.

“You paid $129.3 million for a facility in my state that was assessed at less than half of that, at $62 million,” Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) told then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a Senate oversight hearing in March.

ICE bought one 235-acre plot—in Social Circle, Georgia—for $128.5 million. Its prior owner, a real estate developer, paid $29 million for the property in 2023 and built a warehouse there, an improvement the tax assessor valued around $26 million.

“In Oakwood, Georgia, the government paid $68 million for a warehouse and surrounding land that was appraised in 2025 for a combined $7.1 million,” adds USA Today. “Experts in federal property acquisition said DHS may be paying high prices to compel developers and commercial landowners to sell their property despite local opposition.” You can do that when you have billions to play with.

GOP Congressman Says Georgia Town Doesn’t Have ‘Sufficient Resources’

Indeed, there has been considerable local opposition—even in otherwise sympathetic locales, where neighbors worry about the effect a sudden influx of guards and detainees could have on the existing infrastructure.

Many of the chosen sites are in rural areas. Social Circle has just under 5,500 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but the detention center that ICE plans to build there would hold up to 10,000 detainees. When fully staffed and at capacity, it would triple the local population.

“Sites undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure prior to purchase,” an ICE spokesperson tells Reason.

ICE’s infrastructure analysis said the center in Social Circle would generate about 1 million gallons of wastewater per day. The area is currently served by a wastewater treatment facility with a 1.25 million gallon daily capacity, and the city had already committed to build a new plant. But as city officials have warned, the “current wastewater system processes 660,000 gallons a day and is already operating at capacity. It cannot accommodate an increase in usage of this magnitude.”

They added that the 1.25 million gallon facility is located in another county and does not service the site or any part of the town. And while the city did plan to build another treatment plant, construction would take 18 months—and even then, it would process only 1.5 million gallons per day.

The planned processing center in nearby Oakwood, slated for 1,500 beds, would run into the same problems. City manager B.R. White tells Reason the town is already near its wastewater treatment capacity, and a new ICE facility would compete for already-strained resources.

Both are Trump-friendly areas. The president won more than 70 percent of each county’s votes in 2024. But political partisanship is not enough to overcome logistical hurdles.

“The City of Oakwood supports ICE’s mission of apprehending and detaining individuals with criminal records,” says a statement from the mayor and city council. “Our concern is not with the agency’s lawful role in public safety. Our concern is with the proposed location and the process by which this site was selected, which occurred without consultation, coordination, or impact analysis involving any local governing body.”

“Although I am aligned with the mission of ICE…I agree with the community that Social Circle does not have the sufficient resources that this facility would require,” Rep. Mike Collins (R–Ga.), a stalwart Trump supporter who represents the city in Congress, wrote on Facebook. “I have asked DHS to continue evaluating the impacts that the facility would have on Social Circle and to ensure we can accomplish the mission without negatively impacting this community.”

DHS Uses Fuzzy Math To Justify Purchases

Local officials don’t just worry about what an ICE facility will do to their plumbing. They worry about what it’ll do to the local economy.

When ICE builds a detention center in a rural area, it takes a place where a business could have gone instead. ICE purchased a property in Romulus, Michigan, to turn into a processing site with 500 beds. According to state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D–Detroit), the government “outbid an auto supplier” to purchase the property.

ICE outbid an auto supplier to acquire a warehouse they intend to turn into a detention facility.

Hundreds of community members joined in support of the Romulus City Council – who voted unanimously on a resolution opposing this detention center. pic.twitter.com/Mb2nDelmlZ

— Mallory McMorrow (@MalloryMcMorrow) February 26, 2026

It also removes tax revenue from the local government’s coffers. In 2025, that warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, yielded $341,000 in tax revenue. White tells Reason that the Oakwood property would have generated over $771,000 in total annual tax revenue—including $113,800 for the city and $435,000 for the school system. Eric Taylor, city manager of Social Circle, says the city’s share of taxes from that property was $166,000. But the federal government is exempt from paying property taxes, so each of those properties will become an empty spot on the town’s balance sheet.

ICE claims detention warehouses will be a boon to local economies. To do this, officials use the same industrial-policy arguments that state and local governments use when pushing to subsidize factories or stadiums.

An ICE spokesperson tells Reason that the agency expects the Oakwood facility to “bring 1,520 jobs to the area,” “contribute $159.2 million to GDP,” and “bring in more than $34.3 million in tax revenue.” The detention center in Social Circle, meanwhile, would net 9,800 jobs, $1 billion in GDP, and $221 million in tax revenue.

“The numbers they toss out are a little like economic forecast numbers, which can be massaged,” says White. “I would ask that they validate them. Show us your work, show us how it impacts us directly.”

“They say they’ve done an economic impact analysis for our area,” adds Taylor. “I have not seen it yet; I’ve been asking for it. But if it’s anything like…their engineering analysis, I don’t know that I would trust their numbers.”

They’re right to be skeptical. While it’s certainly possible that the facilities will have some beneficial spillover effects, governments routinely promise big benefits to justify economic development subsidies—if we give money to this company, it will build a factory here, creating jobs and generating economic growth—that then fail to materialize. Taxpayers come out worse off.

This is just as true for detention facilities as it is for factories and stadiums. “Prisons bring substantial and persistent gains in public employment,” according to a study by Janjala Chirakijja of Monash University published in The Review of Economics and Statistics. “However, additional jobs at the prisons generate little spillover effects on private sector employment and fail to provide a major boost to local economic activity.”

Even if ICE’s projections were accurate, there’d be little reason to believe these will be permanent jobs. In a press release, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R–Ga.) touted the Oakwood facility as “a major economic investment.” But while an ICE spokesperson tells Reason the Oakwood processing site “and its construction” would “bring 1,520 jobs to the area,” Clyde wrote that it “will support a total of 1,520 jobs during retrofit and up to 429 jobs each year of operation” (emphasis added). This makes more sense: Oakwood is expected to house 1,500 people, and a facility with one employee per detainee would be absurdly overstaffed. By comparison, federal prisons average one guard for every nine inmates.

Similarly, ICE says the warehouse it bought in Romulus, Michigan, “and its construction” will bring 1,458 jobs—nearly three times the number of detainees it plans to hold. The number of permanent jobs will certainly be far fewer.

This scenario is even worse than your average industrial-policy boondoggle. When cities or states subsidize private companies’ projects in the hopes of creating economic growth down the line, any jobs that result from it are at least private sector jobs and will not be forever financed by taxpayers. Even if everything ICE promises comes true and the Romulus center supports 1,400 jobs, those jobs would be completely funded by the federal government, and by extension your taxes.

Courts Could Slow Down, or Block, ICE Warehouses

How can these communities keep the government from setting up an immigration warehouse and drying up their resources?

They have few options. “We’re limited in a lot of ways just because of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which says the federal government is not subject to the regulations of state and local governments,” says Taylor of Social Circle. “Our zoning code doesn’t allow a detention facility anywhere in the city, to start with. But since the federal government is not subject to zoning, you can’t go after them and say, well, we don’t allow that here.”

But it might be possible to stymie the feds in other ways. “The little town of 5,000 people could waste the federal government’s time going to court,” says M. Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research at California YIMBY.

Gray is a fierce critic of zoning—he wrote a book called Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It—but he’s open to using such otherwise troublesome laws to kick out the feds. “My very principled position on local control is that I support policy being dictated by the level of government that will maximize human freedom and prosperity,” he tells Reason. “I think local government should have the right to say, no, we don’t want to have a federal concentration camp for immigrants in our backyard.”

“The real thing that they can do,” says Gray, “that would really cause an issue is just massively delay all of the things that the city is going to need to do for the facility. If the city controls water and other utilities, city inspectors and city engineers are going to have to go out and do that work. And they can do it slowly and in a hostile manner, or they can do it promptly. There’s so many mechanisms like that where if a local government was really of the mind that we just don’t want this, there’s so many different ways they could slow it down and fully derail it.”

In other words, cities can exert pressure by doing what governments so often do: bog projects down in red tape.

Many Republicans Oppose Hosting ICE Facilities

After ICE purchased a warehouse near Williamsport, Maryland—a town with a population of less than 2,000—state Attorney General Anthony G. Brown sued in federal court to halt construction, arguing that the federal government had acted “without any public input and ignored the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act.” On March 11, U.S. District Judge Brendan A. Hurson granted a temporary restraining order to halt construction “given the exigent circumstances identified in the motion, including the likelihood of irreparable harm resulting from the [state’s] environmental concerns.”

That’s not the only way local opposition has had an effect. In February, ICE revealed plans to build a processing site in Merrimack, New Hampshire. Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, announced two weeks later that after “productive discussions” with area officials, “the Department of Homeland Security will not move forward with the proposed ICE facility in Merrimack.” That same week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) announced on X that DHS “will not move forward with a proposed ICE facility in Wilson County.” Also in February, a developer declined to sell ICE a property in Kansas City.

In other words, even many Republicans don’t want ICE facilities in town.

In April, the Associated Press reported that DHS is “pausing” the purchase of new warehouses “as it scrutinizes all contracts” from Noem’s tenure. (Trump fired Noem in March amid reports of profligate spending.) The A.P. added that “warehouse purchases that were already made are also being scrutinized.” But the government had by that point spent over $1 billion on 11 industrial properties across the country. Even if DHS abandoned warehouse projects going forward, Congress still apportioned tens of billions of dollars for them, which newly confirmed Secretary Markwayne Mullin can spend.

The post ICE Is on a $45 Billion Building Spree. Can Small Towns Support These New Migrant Warehouses? appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/9GfWtc6
via IFTTT

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don’t worry if you end up in a tough spot this week, everything will be alright.

If hosting the NFL draft or getting drafted seems like a great deal to you, I’m sorry to say those two things are not as glorious as they seem. Keep reading to find out why. We’ll close with some thoughts on the shockingly high prices being charged for transit and parking at the World Cup.

Locker Room Links

• An ESPN version of Jeopardy! is apparently in the works, with Joe Buck likely to host.
• Zachariah Branch, who will probably get drafted this weekend, was arrested for obstructing a sidewalk and obstructing a law enforcement officer.
• For sports bars, streaming sports is more complicated and expensive than you think.
• President Donald Trump apparently wants former President Teddy Roosevelt inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame (a bit odd, considering Roosevelt was a critic of professionalizing sports and had more of a direct impact on the college game).
• Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisc.) has a plan to regulate sports broadcasts.
• Kansas City (the Missouri one) is prepared to spend “up to $600 million” on a new Royals stadium.
• Dallas might demolish its city hall to build a new entertainment district, including a Mavericks arena.
• An online mob got mad at Nike for a Boston Marathon ad that said “Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated.” Nike gave in and removed the ad.
• Now the Justice Department is investigating MLB’s streaming deals, after recently opening an investigation into the NFL’s deals.
• “The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine“
• Elsewhere in Reason: “The Promise and Limits of Trump’s Psychedelic Therapy Order“
• The Commanders added a spear in their alternate logo and people got mad:
  

  The Association on American Indian Affairs called the Commanders' logo update "disappointing and inappropriate," adding, "We are not your mascot," per @USAToday.

  The team called its new alternate logo, which features a spear and interwoven "W," "a powerful joining of past and… pic.twitter.com/Q4J5sQIwiQ

  — Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports) April 17, 2026

Pittsburgh’s Draft Debacle

If you believe the NFL and local authorities, hordes of football fans are about to descend on Pittsburgh from all over the country to spend gobs of money watching the NFL draft in person, forever altering the region’s economy for the better. As many as 700,000 fans might attend, they say, with the expected economic impact well within the range of “$120 million to upwards of $213 million.” (Don’t worry, the draft will also result in 500 new trees planted in Allegheny County, plus “400 hanging flower baskets and 420 yellow-and-black planters” installed downtown.) 

If you really think all that is going to happen, then spending a measly $19 million in taxpayer dollars to bring the draft to town seems well worth it. Pennsylvania is spending about $13 million of that, with the rest coming from county and city sources. It is mostly flowing to Pittsburgh’s tourism nonprofit, VisitPittsburgh, which has vaguely said it is spending $16 million on “essential services” (according to great reporting by Mia Hollie of Pittsburgh’s Public Source). The main intent of that spending is on tourist marketing, though.

The problem is that most draft attendees are not traveling from the farthest corners of the country—it’s mostly locals and day-trippers. The total attendance numbers and economic projections are overly rosy too. Once you realize that, the whole facade of the draft as an economic engine worth public subsidies starts to fall.

“The overwhelming majority of visitors are local residents or day-trippers and much of their spending is likely redirected from other local entertainment or dining options rather than being economic gains for the host cities,” economist E. Frank Stephenson from Berry College wrote in a paper last year. “The net gain in room rentals in the 2019-2024 host cities varies greatly from a decrease of nearly 20,000 room nights in Las Vegas to an increase of about 9,000 room nights in Nashville, but in all cases is a small fraction of the claimed number of people attending draft-related events.”

That $19 million in taxpayer spending on the event is just the floor, too. “Pennsylvania State Police said they, too, are coordinating security planning, traffic tactics, risk assessments and interagency exercises, while declining to provide an estimated cost for that work, citing security reasons,” writes Adam Annaccone with the University of Texas at Arlington. “That means the public cost of hosting the draft may be visible only in part.” The cost isn’t just financial, but time: Authorities have spent months training and preparing for the event instead of working on other priorities.

It’s not just law enforcement spending time on the draft, the city is also using in-kind staff time from at least nine city departments, “including, but not limited to: Office of the Mayor; Office of Management and Budget; Innovation and Performance; Finance; Permits, Licenses, and Inspections; Public Safety; Public Works; Parks and Recreation; Mobility and Infrastructure,” according to a 2024 city resolution.

Perhaps worst of all, the city’s public schools are switching to remote learning from Wednesday through Friday because of the draft—even though the draft doesn’t start until late Thursday night.

So overall, Pittsburgh hosting the draft is costing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars (largely spent on marketing), likely won’t meet its overly optimistic attendance and economic impact projections, involves spending a secret amount of money on security, takes up hours and hours of law enforcement and city government staff time, and also keeps kids out of schools for three days.

But hey, at least Pittsburgh is going to get some new trees and flowers out of it.

The Picks Are Screwed

I’m not trying to persuade you to skip watching the draft in person or on TV. If you’re into that, great! Since the Lions are a bit unpredictable with their draft strategy, I usually just wait until I get a phone notification that tells me who we got, and then I’ll read some grade reports afterward.

Either way, draft picks are going to be all smiles when they put on the hat for their new team this weekend. What they might not be thinking about is how much more money they could be earning if it weren’t for the league’s collective bargaining agreement with the players union.

Since 2011, drafted players have basically no negotiating power with their teams. Instead of arguing for their fair market value, they get a preset salary for four years (with a fifth-year option for first-rounders). Because the average career of a drafted player is roughly five or six seasons (though the data here is contested and murky), most NFL players don’t get paid their real market value for most of their career, especially considering the dampening effects of the salary cap. Even with inflation and league growth, the first overall draft pick in 2026 still won’t have a rookie contract as valuable as the first overall draft picks in 2009 and 2010 (partially because those picks, Matt Stafford and Sam Bradford, negotiated for longer deals).

It’s an odd quirk of the law that this arrangement—preset salaries and employers assigned by draft—is only legal because it’s been agreed on between the players union and NFL owners. “The system works out well for the league’s owners, who get to keep a below-market ceiling on a large portion of their player contracts,” as I wrote last year. “It works well for veteran players, who get to soak up a bigger portion of the salary-capped pie. It doesn’t work out for young draft picks—and it’s a surprise more of them don’t speak out about it.”

The Real Journey Is the Fares Paid Along the Way

As the World Cup gets closer, there was lots of discussion last week about some eye-popping public transit news: New Jersey is charging fans $150 for a round-trip regional train ticket to MetLife Stadium (far more than the usual $12.90).

Fortunately, C.C. Sabathia is here to help: He says you can park at his house for $75.

Similarly to New Jersey, Boston is charging $95 for a round-trip bus ticket or $80 for the train. Parking isn’t an easy alternative either: To park near MetLife it’ll cost you $225, and in Boston it’s at least $175. Both stadiums are largely sealed off from other access points because they’re surrounded by parking lots in the suburbs—it’s not like you can just park in a nearby garage with a competitive price and walk a little bit further. Even Uber and Lyft aren’t allowed within a mile of MetLife.

FIFA having its corrupt way with every single city and country its ever touched until suddenly being shocked and stunned into submission by a final, even more corrupt thing: New Jersey

— Conor Rogers (@conorjrogers) April 17, 2026

The economics at play here are interesting. Most fans have already paid hundreds of dollars, possibly thousands, for their match tickets—even more than the average price of an NFL game at these stadiums. They might grumble about adding an unexpectedly high transit cost to their expenses, but having already paid so much for tickets, they’ll almost certainly suck it up and pay.

What’s also interesting is the tightly controlled access to Gillette and MetLife stadiums. A bus service can’t just undercut the expensive options with a budget-friendly $20 fare—it would need approval from FIFA’s local organizers, the stadium operators, and the local governments if it wants access to stadiums past otherwise closed roads.

Basically, there’s high demand for transit to stadiums, and governments (with some help from FIFA) are artificially limiting competitive options that would bring prices down.

Ideally fans would have multiple private sector options competing on price and quality to choose from. But because FIFA promised huge economic benefits that are unlikely to pan out, some governments are starting to look for ways to make up the money they’re going to lose spending on security and other costs.

Fortunately, some cities have figured out ways to get private sector help: Fans leaving World Cup matches in Philadelphia can ride the subway for free, thanks to a sponsorship by Airbnb.

Replay of the Week

I’ve also never seen an indented center field wall like this.

You ever seen an inside-the-park grand slam?

WELL YOU HAVE NOW! pic.twitter.com/OnA6rGczTN

— Oklahoma City Comets (@OKC_comets) April 15, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, the Sun Belt Women’s Golf Championship.

The post Pittsburgh Thinks the NFL Draft Is Worth $19 Million of Taxpayer Money. Here's What Past Draft Data Say. appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/LHvqhzj
via IFTTT

The public health establishment lost America’s trust during the COVID-19 pandemic with its bureaucratic incompetence, “noble lies,” and authoritarian mandates. 

It was about time. Agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been failing the American public for decades. But the agency with the worst track record is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which, long before COVID, caused Americans to lose hundreds of thousands of life years by slowing down drug development. After COVID, the American public had finally started to catch on.

President Donald Trump put a new team in charge of the federal health apparatus, some of them truth-telling contrarians who risked their careers to expose the sins of the old guard. But it’s also a messy picture because the man in charge of Health and Human Services has controversial theories about the dangers of vaccination with little factual basis.

So where does that leave things? Is the public health apparatus finally being upended? Or are the inmates running the asylum?

Nobody, no matter their integrity or political persuasion, should have the power to decide what you or I put in our bodies. The only way to fix America’s regulatory health care apparatus is to dismantle it. A new guard has replaced the old. The COVID reckoning is here. But it hasn’t gone far enough.

The FDA Power Play

The story of an overreaching public health state doesn’t begin with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Dr. Anthony Fauci. It begins with a law passed in 1962.

The FDA didn’t always throw up as much red tape as it does today. In its early days, its only job was to sign off on safety. Drug makers would submit safety evidence, and if the agency didn’t object within 60 days, the drug could go to market and be sold right over the counter. Back then, it was the drug company that decided whether to require a doctor’s prescription or not based on liability concerns.

This voluntary arrangement between drug manufacturers, patients, and doctors worked fairly well, says Jeffrey Singer, a practicing surgeon and senior fellow in the Department of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. 

“If [the drug manufacturer] thought that their drug was a little too risky and some people could have problems and they’ll get sued, they would say to the pharmacist, we only want our product to be sold to people who have a prescription,” he says.

It was a system based on informed consent and voluntary exchange.

But federal control over pharmaceuticals started expanding in 1951, when Congress passed the Durham-Humphrey Amendment, which limited which drugs could be sold over the counter and empowered the FDA to enforce the rule.

That was just the beginning. About a decade later, a sedative called thalidomide was on the market in Europe to help pregnant women alleviate their nausea. The drug turned out to cause severe birth defects. Many fetuses died in utero or shortly after birth.

FDA medical officer Frances Kelsey had blocked thalidomide’s approval in the U.S., earning her the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.

Congress reacted by passing a new law that vastly increased the FDA’s power. The Kefauver-Harris Amendments empowered the agency to hold drugs off the market until it deemed them not only safe but also effective.

Why did thalidomide lead to this vast expansion of FDA power? After all, thalidomide was quite effective, just not at all safe for pregnant mothers. The FDA already had the power to regulate drugs on safety grounds. What happened is that the thalidomide episode created a new political reality, with federal health regulators like Kelsey cast as benevolent guardians of our health and well-being.

The Kefauver Amendment, which had been languishing in Congress, suddenly had broad support. Scientists would have to use randomized controlled trials to ensure that pharmaceuticals do what they say they do.

That all sounds reasonable. But, in practice, the law had some catastrophic unintended consequences.

Roadblocks to Medical Progress

In the 1960s, healthcare was primitive by today’s standards, but as drug innovation accelerated, the FDA became a major bottleneck in the development process, with regulatory compliance adding billions to the cost of bringing new drugs to market.

One researcher coined the phrase “Eroom’s Law” to describe the dramatically falling return on investment for pharma research over time—a backwards spelling of Moore’s Law that describes the exponentially improving efficiency of computing power.

The time it takes to move a drug from discovery to sale increased from eight years in 1960 to between 12 and 15 years by 2010. Research and development costs exploded from about $100 million per drug in 1975 to $1.3 billion by 2005. Pharmaceutical innovation stagnated.

The political incentive problem the FDA faces is that the public is outraged when a harmful drug slips through but tends not to notice when a life-saving drug is blocked.

The economist Milton Friedman described this phenomenon in a 1999 interview with the Hoover Institution. “The pressure on the FDA is always to be late in approving,” Friedman said, “and there is enormous evidence that they have caused more deaths by their late approvals than they have saved by their early approvals.”

FDA regulation is a classic case of the “seen and the unseen,” as the French economist Frédéric Bastiat put it. But just because something’s invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t tragic.

Cancer researchers calculated that a five-year delay in approving a lung cancer drug with a modest one-percent cure rate would cost 282,000 life-years, while stricter trial regulations would save only 16. University of Chicago economists found that when the FDA did speed up approvals in the early ’90s, faster access saved between 180,000 and 310,000 life-years, compared to 56,000 life-years lost to drugs eventually withdrawn for safety reasons.

But in some cases, the public did catch on.

In the 1980s, AIDS patients revolted against the agency for being slow to approve various drugs, including thalidomide, the drug that caused profound birth defects in the late 1950s. It turns out the drug is also an effective anti-inflammatory that’s safe to take if you’re not pregnant. But the FDA had never approved it for use by anyone.

Most of the FDA’s destructive policies don’t inspire much of a backlash, but its policies continue to impede access to chemicals beneficial to our health. In the early 1990s, the FDA prohibited food manufacturers from touting folic acid as a useful supplement to prevent birth defects despite robust scientific literature in its favor. The FDA eventually became so convinced of its beneficial effects that it mandated that it be included as a supplement in bread, once again flexing its monopoly power to ensure that what isn’t prohibited becomes mandatory.

“FDA is a monopoly,” says Singer. “And because it’s a monopoly, there’s no room for any debate or any competing ideas.”

If you were reading Reason magazine in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, you might have been aware of the unintended consequences of FDA regulation. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that the general public started to wake up to the problem.

COVID and the Old Guard of Public Health

During COVID, public health agencies from the CDC down to county health commissioners gained unprecedented power to determine what types of gatherings were permitted, what sort of business could stay open, and whether or not you had to be vaccinated to hold a job. It enforced a six-foot social distance rule that turned out to be based on…nothing.

The FDA was part of the same fiasco. Early in the pandemic, COVID test kits manufactured by the CDC turned out to be flawed and needed to be recalled. Private labs began producing their own test kits, but the FDA blocked their use, and only 40 labs nationwide had approved tests two months into the pandemic. It took almost a year to authorize at-home test kits.

The FDA was supposed to be run by scientists strictly following the evidence, insulated from the hurry and strife of politics. That turned out not to be true.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was part of the new guard brought in to oversee vaccine approvals at the FDA as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, believes that before he worked at the agency, the FDA colluded with Pfizer to slow-roll the initial approval of the first COVID vaccine in order to to prevent Trump from taking credit for it before the November 2020 election.

“If somebody wants to say, ‘When was the first moment that politics played a role in this [vaccine approval] process?’ I think it was the initial release date,” said Prasad during a July 2025 FDA press conference.

Pfizer had been on track to have the data from a 40,000-person trial by mid-October, but changed the study’s endpoint at the last minute. Prasad says there was no scientific or medical basis for the change. 

“Why was the initial statistical analysis plan changed?” he asks. “Was it changed for scientific reason, a medical reason, a statistical reason? As somebody who’s been a professor of epidemiology and in medicine for 20 years, I cannot see any scientific or medical basis to change the physical plan.”

Delaying the vaccine, Prasad says, led to unnecessary deaths from COVID. “That winter was a very terrible winter,” he says, “and had the vaccine been available five weeks sooner…I think a lot of people’s lives would have been saved. So we may be talking about tens of thousands of lives. So to me, this is the original sin…this moment in time.”

That’s not the only example of politics likely shaping FDA decision making. Seven months into his term, then-President Joe Biden announced that the FDA would be approving COVID boosters—before the FDA even had a chance to review the safety data. 

“President Biden got up to the microphone and said, as of September, one month hence, we are going to offer a third dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine,” says Dr. Paul Offit. “Based on what data?”

Offit was a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee at the time and voted against the Biden administration’s booster timeline. There was already evidence that with the COVID vaccine, there was a risk of myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. Two senior FDA officials resigned following Biden’s announcement, with one of them, Philip Krause, later telling Congress that the political pressure to clear the way for mandates was overbearing. 

“There was some significant circumstantial evidence that a desire to implement mandates likely had something to do with the speeding up of the review timeline,” Krause testified to Congress in 2024. “Even the perception of political influence can undermine trust in the agency, especially during a pandemic…The system is set up to permit hierarchy to overrule science.”

What if the FDA had run safety tests but had zero involvement in vaccine approval? 

Some Americans might have chosen to accept the risk of getting the COVID vaccine early on in the pandemic, before it had been tested. Others might choose to wait years for better data on its effects to surface. We should be allowed to make our own medical decisions based on our risk tolerance, vulnerabilities, and individual health profiles.

Instead, the federal government prevented many of us from trying the vaccine, and then it attempted to coerce many of us into getting it.

The Biden administration mandated that all 84 million Americans working at companies regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) be vaccinated. The Supreme Court eventually struck down that mandate, but only after many people had already gotten vaccinated out of fear they’d lose their jobs.

Americans were catching on. If thalidomide had made federal regulators seem like trustworthy guardians of our bodily health, COVID did the opposite. It showed their fallibility, intellectual corruption, and incompetence.

“We kind of lost the trust of the American public,” says Offit. “They didn’t trust us anymore. And hence, now we have RFK Jr.”

Public Health’s New Guard

Offit is right. But the new guard is also composed of some highly qualified scientists who bravely spoke out against the public health establishment during the pandemic.

Under Trump, Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of lockdowns and the NIH, became the new director of the NIH. Marty Makary, a longtime critic of the FDA for slowing down drug development, became head of the agency. And yet both men report to RFK Jr., who, rather than depoliticize FDA decision making, injected a different politics—his own.

Four months after becoming health secretary, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the committee that makes vaccine recommendations to the CDC, replacing them with researchers who share his skepticism. 

“No one in your job has ever fired every committee member all at once,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D–Colo.) told Kennedy at a Senate hearing. “You told the American people that you were going to bring great people onto the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] panel, not anti-vaxxers.”

Among the “anti-vaxxers” whom Bennet was accusing Kennedy of appointing was Robert Malone, whom Bennet says “claimed that the commonly used mRNA vaccine causes a form of AIDS and can damage children’s brains, their heart, their immune system, and their ability to have children in the future.”

Kennedy also directed the CDC to change its “Vaccines and Autism” page, which previously declared studies found “no link” between vaccines and autism, to say that the claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not evidence-based. 

“Technically, you can never prove something didn’t happen,” says Offit, a critic of Kennedy’s rhetoric about vaccines. “But there are 24 separate studies in three continents in seven different countries showing that there’s no association between getting MMR vaccine and having autism.”

Kennedy once told podcaster Lex Fridman that he didn’t trust a single vaccine. When Fridman asked him to name any vaccines he thought were good, Kennedy replied, “I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

The consequences of Americans’ increasing vaccine skepticism have been measurable. The U.S. saw more annual measles cases in 2025 than at any point since 1991—including almost 1,000 cases in South Carolina and 800 in Texas, where two children died.

Though Kennedy has since made public statements encouraging families to get the measles vaccine, he told Reason in 2023 that childhood diseases like measles were “self-limiting and harmless to almost all children” and that vaccines against them prevent kids from building “your immune response against all kinds of really bad disease.” 

When the American Academy of Pediatrics stepped in to offer its own vaccine guidance, RFK threatened doctors who went against the CDC’s new childhood vaccine recommendations with legal liability.

Kennedy railed against top-down government control of medicine when the other team was in power. Now he’s using it to impose his own preferences on other people.

On the upside, the new guard has deregulated health care to some degree. At the FDA, Makary has vowed to question old assumptions, especially on approval timelines. 

“Why does it take 10 to 12 years for a new drug to come to market?” he asked on an episode of the All-In Podcast. “We’ve become so lukewarm and passive accepting that horrible timeline that it’s just become the status quo. We’ve got to challenge these deeply held assumptions.”

He’s also signaled a shift toward Bayesian methods for evaluating drug effectiveness, in which the FDA acknowledges the limits of its own knowledge and acts more like a sports bettor, synthesizing information from many sources to wager on the likelihood that a treatment works for specific patients.

The FDA not only slows down drug development, but many of the studies that do lead to drug approvals are poorly designed or inconclusive. Before coming to the agency, Prasad was one of the most trenchant critics of the FDA’s approval process, and he sought to raise its standards before resigning in March.

Statistician Aaron Brown agrees with Prasad that many studies leading to FDA approval are poor or inconclusive. But Brown says even better clinical trials won’t tell us conclusively how a new drug will perform in the wild. The best approach is Bayesian—let doctors and patients try new drugs, and then we can gradually learn from their effects. 

“Frequentists look for decisions,” Brown explains. “Approve the drug, don’t approve the drug. Make everybody get the vaccine. Let nobody take the vaccine. Bayesians want to hand you a list of odds and say, ‘OK, if you take this pill, there’s a 10 percent chance you’ll get cured, a two percent chance it’ll kill you.’ The recent FDA action is primarily directed at Bayesian practice. They wanna bring more Bayesian tools into what is basically a frequentist FDA.” 

The Bayesian approach also takes into account the heterogeneity of human physiology. A drug that fails in a broad clinical trial, or that brings outsized risk for one class of patients, might be transformative—or at least worth trying—for another subset of the population.

Brown wonders whether a more Bayesian FDA might have avoided the pitfalls of the one-size-fits-all approach of COVID-era vaccine trials and recommendations.

“If the FDA were entirely Bayesian,” he says, “They’d say, ‘OK who needs this [COVID vaccine] the most?’ Old people with risk factors who have high exposure to COVID—they need it the most…it can have a lot of bad effects and it’s still a good deal for them. So we give it to a bunch of them and we watch them very carefully…We’re seeing, how do they feel? When did they take the vaccine? When did they get COVID if they got it? What symptoms did they have? And we do trial and error…We’d never make it mandatory. We just slowly move to [encouraging vaccination], and we let people make their own decision based on their own circumstances.”

If Makary makes the drug approval process less stringent, that would be progress, but who knows if the next administration will undo these reforms? He wouldn’t be the first FDA director to try and fail at slashing red tape.

That’s why the better outcome would be for the FDA close up shop and disappear.

Real Medical Freedom

Singer, author of the recent book Your Body, Your Health Care, says that before the government broadened its power, private organizations helped patients determine whether or not treatments were effective.

“The American Medical Association [AMA] had created its Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry,” he says. “Any pharmaceutical manufacturer that wanted to advertise in medical journals had to submit its product for testing by the AMA.”

Pharmaceutical companies still monitor safety and effectiveness today. 

“Kaiser Permanente—a vertically integrated, prepaid health care system—they have a vested interest in knowing whether certain medications cause complications,” Singer says, “because since you pay upfront for care, it’s going to cost them money if a drug is not safe.”

That’s why Kaiser Permanente partnered with the FDA to uncover the heart problems caused by the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx, often prescribed to treat arthritis. The results led the manufacturer to pull it from the market, even though the FDA never mandated that they do so.

“[The manufacturers] were concerned about their liability,” says Singer. “So these things have a way of taking care of themselves without the FDA.”

The problem isn’t who’s in charge; it’s that anybody is in charge at all. Health care decisions are best left to patients and their doctors.

But the health care system is so complex and interdependent that the entire system needs to be unravelled. 

Ending the Medical Monopoly 

The FDA’s power derives, in part, from the fact that insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid are often compelled to cover the drugs that they approve. If a new treatment is highly experimental and unproven, patients should have the right to give it a try. But insurance companies and the government shouldn’t be required to foot the bill.

Brown says the FDA would do a lot less harm if it filled a purely advisory role, stripped of its power to keep drugs off the market.

“I would love the FDA to decide it was only an informational agency,” he says. “You have to change the goal of the FDA. The goal of FDA is no longer telling people what to do. It’s no longer saying these things are forbidden, these things are required.”

In this scenario, if you want to take drugs that have FDA approval, go right ahead. If you want to try drugs that don’t have FDA approval, have at it. It’s more likely you’d have to pay for them out of pocket, but nobody should have the right to stop you.

“The problem you have when you have a government monopoly,” says Singer, “is even if you have the best intended, smartest people whose hearts are in the right place, it shouldn’t be up to one regulator to decide what we adults are willing to take risks for—everyone has their own risk-benefit assessment.”

Meanwhile, medicine is becoming increasingly individualized, tailored to our unique bodily makeup, which makes the one-size-fits-all approach of FDA approval or denial even more outdated. That’s also nothing new—just look at how thalidomide both caused horrifying birth defects when taken by pregnant women and helped AIDS patients ameliorate their symptoms. Different bodies need different drugs.

We’re also seeing the melding of biology and computation, and the growing use of AI in medical research, which could produce a cascade of new health care breakthroughs. The danger of a sclerotic bureaucracy delaying a life-saving technology is more acute than ever before. 

“[With] cell and gene therapies and telemedicine and artificial intelligence, lighter touch regulation, more Bayesian approaches to things—we are going to see dramatic advances in healthcare and falling costs,” says Brown.

We can look forward to a much healthier future. But to achieve it, the COVID reckoning has to be about more than replacing one team with another. It must be about clearing the field and allowing us to reclaim full control over what we put in our own bodies.

The post The COVID Reckoning Doesn't Go Far Enough appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/njhLs8x
via IFTTT