Tag: in-the-news

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing a tough reality check. Just a few months into office, the new mayor’s dreams of free buses, free child care, and government-run grocery stores are running into the brick wall of New York City’s massive budget deficit. But when it comes to government food stores at least, the mayor is doubling down anyway.

The city currently faces a $5.4 billion budget gap, which Mamdani has largely blamed on former Mayor Eric Adams. In turn, Mamdani’s primary proposals for closing the gap are to either pressure New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators into raising taxes on the wealthiest New York City residents and corporations—the mayor’s preferred path—or enacting a 9.5 percent property tax in the Big Apple.

Gov. Hochul has poured cold water on the tax-the-rich route, while an across-the-board property tax increase has unsurprisingly received substantial backlash. The latter would also require the acquiescence of the New York City Council, but City Council Speaker Julie Menin has already dismissed the idea as a “nonstarter.”

Of course, other options beyond raising taxes exist for addressing NYC’s budget mess. Namely, the city could cut spending and exercise fiscal restraint. But if spending cuts seem like a pipe dream for a democratic socialist mayor, one might at least expect a temporary moratorium on expensive new spending items.

No such luck. Despite NYC’s fiscal situation, the New York Post reports that Mamdani plans to earmark $70 million for his central campaign proposal of government-run grocery stores. The funding would supposedly flow to the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), which would be tasked with scouting sites for the five proposed stores across Gotham’s five boroughs, as well as spearheading the construction of the stores.

The $70 million price tag is an escalation from the mayor’s $60 million campaign trail projection, and it’s just the start. The Post confirmed with EDC that the reported $70 million doesn’t even include the cost of a feasibility study for the new grocery stores, the price tag of which remains unknown.

It also doesn’t cover the ongoing cost of running the stores, such as building maintenance or paying the salaries of government employees who may ultimately staff the stores (the mayor has left the operational details unclear so far).

As commentators across the ideological spectrum have pointed out, government-run grocery stores are a particularly bad policy idea. For one, past efforts have met with poor results and have cost cities money that can never be recouped.

There’s also little evidence that they accomplish their intended purpose of helping city residents.

According to NYC’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, Julie Su (who served as President Biden’s former Acting Secretary of Labor), the priority is to target so-called “food deserts” in NYC in order to provide better access to healthy food options. But research has failed to turn up much evidence that government-run stores lead to healthier eating habits among local residents.

Government-run stores would also inevitably inject more politics into the food supply. Food—like everything else—has become increasingly politicized in recent years, and putting the government in charge of stocking store shelves would simply accelerate this trend.

As I wrote about previously in these pages, what constitutes “healthy” eating has been controversial for decades. The federal government, in the form of its dietary guidelines, has vacillated back-and-forth about which food groups are good or bad, embracing recommendations that have arguably contributed to rising American obesity rates over the years.

It’s similarly foolhardy to expect NYC’s government to demonstrate nutritional clairvoyance in what it puts on government-owned shelves. A final lesson can be learned from the experience of state-run liquor stores—still present in 13 states—which have demonstrated that these government-run retailers are engines for corruption and political favoritism.

Mamdani’s government-run grocery stores make neither political nor financial sense. But despite a massive budget shortfall, the mayor remains undeterred in his efforts to run up the grocery bill.

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With a few days’ perspective on the State of the Union address, which grows ever closer in spirit and content to outtakes from the prophetic 2006 comedy Idiocracy, it’s worth revisiting one of Milton Friedman’s most enduring insights. “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending,” the libertarian Nobel laureate counseled. “That’s the true tax.” Don’t be distracted, he added, by talk about balancing budgets or cutting marginal tax rates. Focus on how much money the federal government spends each year, because that’s the ultimate indicator of how much it costs.

Friedman was talking in the late 1970s, when top marginal income-tax rates were 70 percent and debates were focused on lowering the tax burden and, by implication, government spending. Back then, deficit spending was something that mostly happened during wartime or recessions, rather than being taken for granted the way it has been since Jimmy Carter occupied the White House. If you cut the amount of money the government brought in, went the general argument, you also cut the amount of money it could spend. Friedman was emphasizing that whether spending is paid for in the moment, it is the best proxy for government involvement in everyday life. It has to be paid for eventually, either by raising taxes, reducing services, or by inflating the currency—all actions that make us subordinate to politics and politicians.

In Tuesday’s speech, President Donald Trump reduced fiscal responsibility to a few lines about taming deficits by announcing a “war on fraud,” to be prosecuted by Vice President J.D. Vance. “He’ll get it done,” promised Trump. “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.” Thus ends nearly half a century of the Republican Party being, at least rhetorically, the party of less spending and smaller government.

Trump’s promise to balance the budget by clamping down on fraud is, to invoke the chief executive Trump replaced, utter malarkey. The barely cold corpse of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) testifies to how surprisingly hard it is, even for wunderkind spreadsheet hotshots with battle names like Big Balls, to realize cost savings in a federal budget that tops $7 trillion. The absolute best-case scenario, wrote Reason‘s Eric Boehm, is that DOGE saved $170 billion rather than the $2 trillion that Elon Musk promised at its outset. (At least, that’s what DOGE finally claimed, but given the agency’s reputation for fudging its numbers, we should take it with a grain of salt or two.) Whatever numbers Vance comes up with should be met with similar skepticism. After all, this is the man who, when called out for circulating unsubstantiated stories of Haitian immigrants grilling pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, told CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

When it came to talking about spending in the State of the Union, Trump wasn’t at all tempered. He bragged about the $1 trillion defense budget he signed, the $1,776 “warrior dividends” sent to service members, and his Trump Accounts for babies born between 2025 and 2028, a program estimated to cost taxpayers over $15 billion through 2034.

To the extent he talked about the revenue side, he congratulated himself for instituting “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries,” that brought in “billions of dollars.” As many analyses show, Americans paid upwards of 90 percent of the cost of the tariffs, which were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court and will eventually be refunded. While refusing to acknowledge that tariffs are taxes paid by his countrymen, Trump did boast of last year’s tax cuts:

I urged this Congress to begin the mission by passing the largest tax cuts in American history….And with the great Big Beautiful Bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors. And we also made interest on auto loans tax-deductible. The first time, but only if the car is made in America.

But, following Friedman, let’s keep our eye on spending, not revenue. The results are as disheartening as they are bipartisan. Here are recent annual outlays, as tallied by the Treasury Department’s FiscalData site. The data are inflation-adjusted in 2025 dollars:

• 2015: $5.02 trillion
• 2016: $5.17 trillion
• 2017: $5.23 trillion
• 2018: $5.27 trillion
• 2019: $5.61 trillion
• 2020: $8.16 trillion
• 2021: $8.05 trillion
• 2022: $6.85 trillion
• 2023: $6.48 trillion
• 2024: $6.93 trillion
• 2025: $7.01 trillion

The current estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for FY 2026 is $7.4 trillion. That’s for a country that is post-pandemic and not at war (at least not as of when I’m writing this). If we cannot reduce spending now through political means, it will ultimately be reduced through a recession, inflation, or an abrupt cut in government services. Given that the debt held by the public equals the size of our economy, it will be extremely difficult for the government to handle such a crisis.

Decades after Friedman’s initial warning at the start of chronic deficit spending, it’s still the spending, and it keeps getting worse with every passing year.

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Christian Britschgi is back this week, and you won’t want to miss the incredibly true story of what happened to him. From there, the boys tackle mounting opposition to AI data centers, President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, and why more libertarians ought to be concerned about the Epstein files fallout.

Cultural items discussed this week include A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms finale and Black Mirror. Robby Soave also has a lot to say about card games, board games, and playing mafia online.

0:00—Christian returns

3:22—Joy of data centers

18:56 —The Epstein Files and cancel culture

33:20 —Ayn Rand would have disliked Jeffrey Epstein

48:24—Card games, board games, and more

1:00:52—We loved A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

1:07:50—Black Mirror is too depressing

1:21:58—Dying to avoid Canada

• Video Editor: Cody Huff

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During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump described the Supreme Court’s rejection of his “emergency” tariffs as a “very unfortunate ruling.” That was mild compared to what the president said immediately after the Court’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump.

On the day of that ruling, Trump condemned the Republican appointees who voted against him as “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical-left Democrats.” He was especially angry at two of his own nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, saying they were “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” “an embarrassment to their families,” and cowardly pawns of his political opponents, whom he describes as “Marxists and communists and fascists.”

That episode illustrated Trump’s habit of deploying wildly inaccurate ideological labels against people who disagree with him. The purpose of these epithets is not to describe the actual views of those people but to cast them as extremists whose opinions are not worth considering. Although Trump ostensibly is talking about the politics of his opponents, the terms he uses are so detached from reality that they communicate nothing beyond his personal revulsion.

In that respect, Trump’s ideological labels are no different from his other ad hominem attacks. Trump diagnoses his foes as “sick,” “crazy,” and “deranged” (a tactic echoed by many of his critics). He calls them “sinister” and “evil” people who are “trying to destroy our country” because they “hate our country.” He deems them a “disgrace to our nation” because “they’re against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again.” He says they “live like vermin within the confines of our country,” constituting “the enemy from within.” Although Trump’s ideological characterizations might seem more substantive, they are no more informative than his allegations of mental illness, malign motives, disloyalty, or kinship with cockroaches. 

“We cannot allow a handful of communist radical left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws and assume the duties that belong solely to the president of the United States,” Trump declared at a rally in Michigan last April. “Judges are trying to take away the power given to the president to keep our country safe, and it’s not a good thing.”

Trump did not specify exactly which decisions he had in mind. But it hardly matters, because he reflexively portrays rulings against him as a reflection of leftist bias, even when that charge makes no sense.

Consider what Trump said after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against his tariffs in September. He described the court as “Highly Partisan,” implying that its reasoning was driven by political affiliation, and said the majority was “a Radical Left group of judges,” implying that the result was dictated by ideology rather than a careful consideration of the facts and the law.

While it is true that six of the judges who thought Trump had exceeded his legal authority were appointed by Democratic presidents (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden), the majority also included Alan D. Lourie, who was nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1990. Notably, Lourie was one of four judges who went further than the majority, arguing that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 law on which Trump was relying, “does not authorize the President to impose any tariffs.”

Meanwhile, the dissent was written by Judge Richard Taranto, an Obama appointee who was conspicuously sympathetic to the Trump administration during oral argument. Taranto’s opinion was joined by another Obama appointee and two judges nominated by George W. Bush.

In Learning Resources, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s decision, siding with the four judges who concluded that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs at all. True to form, Trump accused the three Republican appointees in the majority of catering to “radical-left Democrats,” even though their conclusions were faithful to conservative principles.

Trump maintained that IEEPA empowers the president to impose any taxes he wants on any imports he chooses from any country he decides to target for any length of time he considers appropriate whenever he deems it necessary to “deal with” an “unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad that constitutes a “national emergency.” And according to Trump, the only way to restrain that power would be the veto-proof congressional majority required to terminate the supposed emergency.

That was a bold claim, to say the least, and there were plenty of reasons to question it, starting with the fact that IEEPA does not mention tariffs and had never before been used to impose them. Trump’s power grab raised obvious concerns about the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the principal opinion in Learning Resources, thought Trump’s reading of IEEPA ran afoul of the “major questions” doctrine, which says the executive branch can exercise delegated powers of “vast ‘economic and political significance'” only with clear congressional approval. Gorsuch agreed, and so did Barrett, although she reframed that doctrine as “an ordinary application of textualism.”

The other three justices—the ones Trump said were “an automatic no” because “they’re against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again”—saw no need to rely on the major questions doctrine. But they agreed that IEEPA cannot reasonably be read as conferring the untrammeled authority that Trump perceived.

There was nothing remotely “radical left” about any of that reasoning. In particular, the major questions doctrine has been championed by the Supreme Court’s conservative wing (including the three dissenters, who implausibly argued that it did not apply in this case). The Court’s conservative majority had implicitly or explicitly relied on the doctrine to reject assertions of power by Democratic presidents, including the Biden administration’s workplace vaccine mandate, nationwide eviction moratorium, and mass cancellation of student debt. If the justices were applying the doctrine consistently, there was no reason to think Republican presidents would be immune from its implications.

Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) against alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua likewise presented a question of statutory interpretation. And as with his IEEPA tariffs, there was ample reason to question his reading of the law. Yet after James Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted the temporary restraining order sought by detainees threatened with summary deportation under the AEA, Trump condemned him as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who “should be IMPEACHED!!!”

One issue in that case was whether it belonged in Boasberg’s court to begin with. The Supreme Court ultimately decided it did not, saying AEA detainees had to seek relief by filing habeas corpus petitions in Texas, where they were held. But the justices also noted that the detainees were entitled to due process, including “judicial review” addressing “questions of interpretation and constitutionality.”

A month after that ruling, Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, rejected the president’s interpretation of the AEA, saying “the historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA…exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.” Did Trump accidentally nominate a “Radical Left Lunatic” to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas?

Four months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit likewise rejected Trump’s use of the AEA, saying he had asserted a nonexistent “invasion or predatory incursion.” The 5th Circuit has a reputation as the country’s most conservative federal appeals court, and the majority opinion in that case was written by Judge Leslie H. Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee who faced intense opposition from Democrats when he was nominated in 2007.

John C. Coughenour, whom Ronald Reagan appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in 1981, likewise does not seem like a “Radical Left Lunatic.” Yet he was the first judge to push back against Trump’s attempt to unilaterally restrict birthright citizenship.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour remarked when he granted a temporary restraining order against Trump’s decree three days after it was issued. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented [was] as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.” In a case that the Supreme Court will consider on April 1, Joseph Laplante, a federal judge in New Hampshire who was appointed by George W. Bush, likewise concluded that Trump’s executive order “contradicts the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the century-old untouched precedent that interprets it.”

On Monday, Trump predicted that the Supreme Court, for which he said he has “a complete lack of respect,” will rule against him in that case. Why? Not because he is wrong on the merits, Trump said, but because the justices are so determined to oppose him that they will “find a way to come to the wrong conclusion,” presumably because they are in thrall to the “radical-left Democrats” whose influence he blamed for the tariff decision.

Trump’s underlings take their cues from him. On Thursday, Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, renewed his complaint about the Justice Department’s failure to obey judicial orders in immigration cases, threatening to hold federal officials in criminal contempt. Tricia McLaughlin, then the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), described Schiltz’s beef as a “diatribe from this activist judge,” adding that “we will not be deterred by activists either in the streets or on the bench.”

Schiltz is a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for conservative icon Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, helped Scalia prepare for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and again served as Scalia’s clerk after he was confirmed. But as McLaughlin tells it, Schiltz is in league with the “anti-ICE agitators” and “rioters” threatening DHS employees who are only trying to protect Americans from “the worst of the worst criminal aliens.”

The Trump administration’s reflexive tarring of its critics as crazy leftists may have reached its apogee when the Federal Trade Commission described the Chamber of Commerce, which is not known for its radicalism, as “a left-wing, open borders supporting activist group.” The provocation, as Reason‘s Jack Nicastro notes, was the organization’s criticism of a regulation regarding pre-merger notifications.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

Victory! This week, S.D. Iowa rejected a mayor and police chief’s invocations of qualified immunity (and the Nuremberg defense) and handed a big win on the merits to our client, who was arrested, jailed, and criminally prosecuted for criticizing them. Good stuff. Click here to learn more.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: To fuel the nightmares of our lawyer listeners, a story of a settlement that was until it wasn’t, powered by litigation financing.

1. After news reports indicate that ICE planned to request immigrants’ addresses from the IRS to aid immigration enforcement, immigrant-rights groups sue to enjoin the information sharing. D.C. Circuit: But the statute that prohibits release of “taxpayer return information” exempts addresses. Injunction denied.
2. Allegation: Cargo pilot who is stuck in Vietnam for reasons outside his control gets pinged by his employer for a same-day, FAA-mandated random drug test in Seattle. Employer: And since you “refused” to take the test, you’re fired. Feds: And you can’t do any piloting until after rehab. D.C. Circuit: The feds’ argument that the FAA need not or cannot review the employer’s test-refusal determination raises serious constitutional concerns under the private nondelegation doctrine, but this goes back for a rethink for other reasons.
3. Without a warrant, officers search a home owned by a North Carolina man on probation, they find drugs and money, and then the gov’t seeks to civilly forfeit the cash. Uh oh! The probationer lived elsewhere, he leased the searched home to his girlfriend, and she did not consent to a search. Does the Fourth Amendment’s warrant exception for searches of probationers extend to property they’ve leased to others? Fourth Circuit: Nope. The search was illegal, and evidence it yielded must be suppressed. Return the money!
4. Fourth Circuit (unpublished): Sure, the county’s water and sewer plan forbids you from building a well on your property, and county employees told you you’re not eligible for a waiver that would let you build a well on your property, but the county hasn’t told you you’re not allowed to build a well on your property until you ask the County Council to change the law and let you build a well on your property and then they say no.
5. Louisiana law requires that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom. A First Amendment violation? Fifth Circuit (en banc): No need to decide that because the case isn’t ripe. (If that’s too boring for you, feel free to enjoy Judge Ho’s concurrence, which would have reached the merits, or any of the four (4) dissents.)
6. Man is arrested in Greenville, Miss. for allegedly stealing a car. Investigators search his phone sans warrant, discover evidence of purchases with a stolen debit card 150 miles away in Southaven. They call the Southaven police and share the information, saying they had a warrant for the search. Southaven police arrest him based on the info. Once charges are dropped, he sues. Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. It was clearly established at the time that a Fourth Amendment search occurs when an officer looks at material from a phone, but there’s no case about second-hand viewings of material from a phone.
7. Owner of Ohio-based trucking company applies for a small-business grant advertised by his insurance company, Progressive. He abandons his application upon learning that only black-owned businesses are eligible (he is white), then sues for racial discrimination. Sixth Circuit: He does not have standing because he was welcome to apply, and who’s to know if they would have ultimately discriminated against him in issuing the grants? Dissent: That is not how anti-discrimination law has ever worked.
8. Allegation: Detroit officer lied on search warrant application and lied on witness stand, resulting in man spending more than seven years in prison for cocaine that he did not deal. (He’s released early after conviction integrity unit finds it can’t verify the officer’s testimony, for instance, whether the confidential informant actually existed.) Sixth Circuit: But officers have absolute immunity for lying on the stand, and the search warrant was for the man’s mother’s house—where he disclaims a privacy interest. So you had to show the officer was lying at some other point in the process, which you didn’t argue.
9. When warden and investigator at Illinois women’s prison learn that a prison counselor is sexually assaulting an inmate, they devise a shambolic plan: using the victim as unwitting bait, in the hopes that the investigator could hide in a drop ceiling and then leap out and catch the counselor in the act. Except that the counselor had nearly 24/7 access to the victim, and the investigator kept scrupulous bankers’ hours. More sexual assault ensues. Seventh Circuit: The warden and the investigator are definitely liable for these obvious Eighth Amendment violations. But only for the period they were executing their preposterous rape-bait plan, not before. Given that distinction—which was muddied a bit at trial—they get a new trial on damages.
10. Eighth Circuit (unpublished): This Arkansas state judge abused his office for sexual gratification and lied to the FBI, but we’ll “spare [him] the indignity” of going through the details. Short Circuit (lacking such scruples): Real piece of work, this guy.
11. Without warning, Des Moines, Iowa officer sets canine on murder suspect who’d jumped off a roof and was trying to flee on foot. The dog bites the suspect for 15 seconds until he’s cuffed. Eighth Circuit: Gotta give a warning. To trial this must go.
12. Under a delegation of authority that Congress blissfully bestowed unto the Presidency long long ago, the holder of that office can de-unionize many swaths of the federal gov’t if the swaths kinda relate to national security. The current holder of the office so de-unionized in March 2025 and along the way mentioned that the unions were saying mean things about him. District court: First Amendment retaliation! Ninth Circuit: He was gonna do that stuff anyway. Concurrence: But this is just a preliminary injunction and, who knows, new facts may come to light.
13. Federal law creates a civil cause of action for victims of human trafficking against companies that benefit from the trafficking. Victims of trafficking sue American seafood importer but lose because the importer merely attempted to benefit but didn’t succeed. Congress responds by clarifying the law to explicitly cover attempt. Is the change retroactive? Ninth Circuit (en banc): Indeed it is.
14. In July 2021, fifty people attended a housing-rights march in Colorado Springs. Afterward, police obtained warrants for data from a protestor who allegedly pushed her bike in front of a running police officer and a nonprofit that helped organize the event. Tenth Circuit: Officers can’t just search everything related to someone they suspect committed a crime. These warrants were insanely overbroad, lacking any limiting principle. No qualified immunity on those Fourth Amendment claims. Dissent: Our caselaw hasn’t kept up with technological advances, so reasonable officers—and judges—could disagree about how to apply 18th-century concepts to digital data.

New case: IJ client Fernando “Fernie” Madrid served Apache County, Ariz. for decades as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal. But when he decided to run for superintendent of schools, the county attorney—who happens to be married to the incumbent superintendent—launched a campaign of harassment against him, including physical assault in the street, an anonymous package containing threats dropped off at Fernie’s home (turns out the shipping was paid for with the county attorney’s credit card), and more. This week, Fernie joined with IJ to file a First Amendment suit against the now-former county attorney, his two villainous henchmen, and the county. Click here to learn more.

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Since his return to the White House last year, President Donald Trump has used the power of his office to shutter renewable energy projects and accelerate fossil fuel development. But solar power could soon get a leg up in the administration, thanks to the help of two unlikely green energy advocates: Katie Miller and Kellyanne Conway. 

On Friday, Politico reported on the efforts of Miller, who is the wife of White House deputy director of policy Stephen Miller, and Conway to promote solar to MAGA audiences. The advocacy came to light earlier this month when Miller tweeted, “Solar energy is the energy of the future….We must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” About a week later, Miller shared a graph from the Energy Information Administration, showing that solar is the fastest-growing source of new energy in the United States.

While it’s certainly possible that Miller thinks of solar as the energy of the future, her public advocacy appears to be financially motivated. As a “confidential strategy memo” obtained by Politico reveals, “[Miller and Conway’s] advocacy is aligned with a campaign by members of the nation’s largest renewable energy lobby group to MAGA-fy solar power.” 

The memo, which comes from the American Clean Power Association (the nation’s largest clean energy industry group), details an “American Energy First” campaign which involves engaging “Conway and conservative influencers like Miller ‘to amplify the benefits of solar energy’ and ‘note the harm that could result from reckless trade policy,'” according to Politico.     

“In the coming weeks,” the campaign will use recent polling data from Conway’s consulting firm showing the popularity of solar among Trump’s base to drive a series of op-eds, podcast partnerships, and ads in right-of-center publications. Miller has denied being paid by the American Clean Power Association or American Energy First. 

Miller is not the first conservative to tout the benefits of solar power, but she is one of the most influential, given her connections to Trump, the White House, and other Republican lawmakers. Still, it’s unlikely to be an easy task to convince MAGA stalwarts to de-escalate their battle on solar (even if several of them privately like the energy source). 

While offshore wind has been the primary recipient of Trump’s antipathy toward renewables, the administration has also passed rules to hamstring solar’s deployment. In July, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a rule requiring all solar and wind projects on federal lands to get his OK before moving forward. Some projects are finally moving forward through this process. 

A month later, Burgum directed his agency to weigh alternatives to renewable projects on federal lands during permitting if they generated less energy per acre than fossil fuels or nuclear power. And as the administration has (wisely) gone after the wasteful green energy subsidies approved by the Biden administration, it has propped up aging coal plants—to the detriment of ratepayers—and nuclear power projects that don’t need federal support. 

Despite all of this, the market has mostly shrugged off the administration’s actions and rhetoric. In 2025, the U.S. added the most solar and energy storage on record, a feat that is expected to be topped again this year. Some of the additions are undoubtedly due to developers scrambling to take advantage of expiring federal subsidies, but the market has long been embracing these technologies and will likely continue to do so. 

Renewables don’t need Trump’s support to thrive, but having a government that doesn’t play favorites with energy sources would provide clarity to developers and investors and benefit consumers in the process. Perhaps Katie Miller will help to deliver this much-needed change. But given MAGA’s penchant for its own brand of socialism, the more likely scenario is that the government will continue to pick energy winners and losers.

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After searching for five days, a partially blind refugee was found dead on Tuesday, only five miles from where U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents dropped him off after releasing him from custody. The discovery raises questions surrounding the conditions in which immigrant detainees are released from federal custody over a year into President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. 

Nurul Amin Shah Alam came to the U.S. as a refugee in December 2024, as a member of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, but was arrested last February in Buffalo, New York, according to The Washington Post. Body cam footage reveals law enforcement officers confronting and using Tasers on Shah Alam, who was trespassing and using a curtain rod as a walking stick. He was then arrested for allegedly trespassing and biting law enforcement officers; he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors “in the interest of justice,” according to a district attorney who noted that a felony conviction would’ve led to Shah Alam’s mandatory deportation, reports The Post. With his sentencing set for next month, Shah Alam posted bond on February 19, and the Erie County Sheriff’s Office transferred him to Border Patrol custody.

According to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) post on X, after Border Patrol agents confirmed that Shah Alam was a refugee and not deportable, the officers offered a “courtesy ride” to “a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station.” 

But Shah Alam never made it inside the “warm, safe” coffee shop. Security footage obtained by Investigative Post, a Buffalo nonprofit, shows a white van dropping off a man matching Shah Alam’s description in front of a Tim Horton’s coffee shop on the evening of February 19. The man in the video exits the van over an hour after the store closed to walk-in customers, walks past the still-open drive-through window, and never enters the coffee shop, according to The Post.  

The DHS also claimed on X that Shah Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance.” However, according to a missing persons poster circulated by family and friends after Shah Alum went missing, he had back problems and difficulty walking. The poster also said that the 56-year-old didn’t know how to use a phone and didn’t know phone numbers or addresses. 

The Erie County Medical Examiner has yet to establish a manner or cause of death, reports The Post. However, since his discovery, Democratic officials have already called for an investigation into and accountability for Shah Alam’s death. Buffalo’s Mayor Sean Ryan accused the CBP of a “dereliction of duty,” and New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul called for “accountability” after agents left him to find his way home alone. And Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York demanded an independent investigation into both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP for answers. 

Concerns have been mounting over the treatment of immigrant detainees ever since Trump kicked off his immigration crackdown last January. Faced with a record number of arrests and detentions, many of whom have no criminal record, the DHS and its subordinate agencies have been accused of a wide range of unconstitutional conduct. Alarmingly, over the last few winter months, immigration agencies have been accused of releasing detainees—some of whom were wrongfully arrested—without a winter coat or a way home, and without returning immigration documents to prove their legal status. 

This pattern, along with the tragic death of Shah Alam, raises serious questions surrounding the DHS’ policies when conducting arrests, detentions, and now releases. Transparency and accountability in federal custody, including immigration detention—however brief—is critical to ensuring not only the safety and constitutional rights of individuals, but to maintaining the public’s trust and support for the rule of law. 

The post Blind Refugee Found Dead 5 Days After Release From Border Patrol Custody in Buffalo appeared first on Reason.com.

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A battle is brewing inside the Pentagon that could determine the future of American military strategy. 

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to cut ties with Anthropic—one of the two AI providers authorized by the Pentagon for classified use—unless the company removed all safeguards from Claude by Friday. This comes after a January memo, in which Hegseth directed the department to only “utilize [AI] models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications.” On Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused Hegseth’s ultimatum. 

In a statement published Thursday night, Amodei said Anthropic would not accommodate the Department of Defense’s request to remove the safeguards on its AI model because, “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.” 

In his letter, Amodei grants that “the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions.” However, Amodei refused to capitulate to Hegseth’s demands, saying that “frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons,” and “mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.”

Amodei’s response is not surprising. He’s long warned that AI can be used nefariously and repeatedly advocated for regulation. Ironically, the very government Amodei trusted to ensure AI safety is now looking to weaponize the technology.

Unlike Amodei’s previous calls for government intervention, which would have insulated Anthropic from competition, this decision threatens Anthropic’s competitiveness.

On Tuesday, Hegseth threatened to label Anthropic a supply chain risk in the event of noncompliance. This “would ban all other DoD suppliers…from using Anthropic in their fulfillment of DoD contracts,” explains Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation who served as senior policy adviser for AI and emerging technology at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2025. 

More disturbing still is Hegseth’s invocation of the Defense Production Act (DPA), which “confers upon the President a broad set of authorities to influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense.” 

Among these authorities are Titles I, III, and VII. Title III grants the president the authority to subsidize certain industries via loans and purchase commitments, while Title VII allows the president to compel information from companies. Title I “is a more straightforwardly Soviet power,” says Ball, and gives the government the authority “to directly command the production of industrial goods.” With this power, the Defense Department “intends to…command Anthropic to make a version of Claude that can choose to kill people without any human oversight,” he says. 

Hegseth’s demands vindicate Amodei’s mid-February warning to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat that AI can be used to undermine constitutional rights and AI. He expressed particular concern about AI rendering public surveillance hyperlegible, empowering the government to efficiently parse through and act on what’s currently an overwhelming amount of data. This would “make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by…finding technical ways around it,” he said.

On Thursday, Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael blithely dismissed Amodei’s concerns: “Mass surveillance violating the 4th Amendment…is illegal which is why the @DeptofWar would never do it.” But an activity’s illegality does not mean the government won’t engage in it. In this case, it already has. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance, has been leveraging AI-powered technology for domestic surveillance, explains Reason’s Autumn Billings.

It’s unclear how this situation will be resolved. Anthropic could forfeit its multimillion-dollar Pentagon contract, lose other business due to its designation as a supply chain risk, or even be nationalized by the feds. Still, Amodei can rest easy knowing that he has taken a stand for privacy and moral responsibility. 

The post Anthropic CEO Refuses Pentagon Demands To Remove Safeguards on Military AI appeared first on Reason.com.

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Last month, a federal judge in New Hampshire issued an injunction purporting to prevent the state from ending its vehicle emission inspection program. The state legislature had repealed the program, effective January 31. No matter, the Judge McCafferty concluded, the state is required to have such a program under the federal Clean Air Act, so the state was enjoined from getting rid of the program.

As I explained in this post, the judge’s injunction is unconstitutional, as it forces the state to implement a regulatory program. The judge claimed this outcome was required by the Clean Air Act, but it is well-established, black-letter law that federal law may not require a state to administer or implement a regulatory program. Any such requirement is commandeering, and is unconstitutional under a line of Supreme Court decisions going back over thirty years, including New York v. U.S., Printz v. U.S., and Murphy v. NCAA.

[Indeed, the history goes back farther, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had taken the position in the 1970s that states could be required to implement vehicle emission inspection programs under the Clean Air Act, only for the Solicitor General to concede the point to the Supreme Court, prompting the dismissal of EPA v. Brown. I have a paper retelling this saga, unearthing some of the anti-commandeering principle’s forgotten history, that I hope to post on SSRN later this year.]

Given the history, and well-established nature of the anti-commandeering principle, I was surprised to read the judge’s order. I was even more surprised to discover that the state AG’s office had not raised the anti-commandeering principle in the state’s defense. Now I am more surprised still, as this past Wednesday the judge denied the state’s motion for a stay, again without any mention of commandeering concerns (and, based on her opinion, it appears the state again failed to raise the argument).

The problem, again, is that Judge McCafferty seems not to understand the nature of our federal system, or the particular requirements of the Clean Air Act. “The Clean Air Act requires New Hampshire’s SIP to contain an I/M program,” she writes in her latest order. That is true, as far as it goes, in that a state that fails to adopt an adequate SIP [State Implementation Plan], or fails to maintain a SIP approved by the EPA (as is the case here), is out of compliance with the Act. But this does not mean that federal law requires New Hampshire or any other state to have such a program. Rather, should a state fail to submit, maintain, or enforce a compliant SIP, federal aw provides that the state can be subject to various sanctions, such as the loss of some federal funding and the direct imposition of a FIP [Federal Implementation Plan]. What the Clean Air Act does not do is provide a basis for forcing a state to adopt any particular regulatory measure–a point which the federal government has accepted for the past fifty years. [For more on what is and is not commandeering or otherwise coercive under the Clean Air Act, see this article I wrote a few years back with Nate Stewart.]

The Clean Air Act operates this way, in part, so as not to commandeer state governments. Under New York v. United States, it is perfectly okay for the federal government to offer inducements for state cooperation, as well as to threaten adverse consequences for state intransigence. But what federal law cannot do is simply direct states to play the federal government’s tune–and yet that is precisely what Judge McCafferty has done. And if there were any question on this point, recall that in Murphy v. NCAA the Supreme Court made abundantly clear that the anti-commandeering principle prevents the federal government from ordering a state not to repeal a state law.

The underlying legal question in this litigation is not a particularly close one. Yet for some reason the state AG’s office did not press the point. This has not escaped the notice of other New Hampshire officials, so perhaps things will change on appeal. Until then, the unconstitutional commandeering of New Hampshire will apparently continue.

 

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