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Walter Olson

On January 21, President Trump issued an executive order that will transform federal anti-discrimination law. It revokes Executive Order 11246, which since 1965 has attached affirmative action and other obligations to federal contracting. Every Republican administration has known that the massive federal contract compliance regulatory scheme that has resulted could be revoked almost entirely with a stroke of a pen, but none has done so till now.

That would be momentous news all by itself. But there’s much more.

The order makes implicit and systematic what was already expected, which is that the second Trump administration will direct vigorous enforcement efforts at companies, universities, bar associations, and the like that sort by race, discriminate in supposedly positive ways, or apply certain types of pressures to employees in the name of diversity. The order directs agencies to identify targets for investigation to include private companies, nonprofits and associations, larger foundations, and colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion.

In other words, don’t expect laissez-faire; much of this scheme envisions keeping continued centralized power in the hands of the federal government, just applying it toward different goals than before. It heavily implies that private DEI efforts, whether or not related to government contracting, violate civil rights laws. It is the courts, however, that will have the say on that, presumably following a barrage of enforcement action from Washington. The feds will also send marching orders to institutions of higher education on how to implement the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision.

Even as EO 11246 vanishes, another part of the order provides that compliance with discrimination law is material in whether federal contractors get paid, giving Washington a strong weapon against contractors that might deviate from its approach. That said, it’s undeniable that the new approach to contractors exemplifies a shift toward what should be the primary goal of procurement: getting the optimal combination of product quality, price, and speed for the agencies involved and for the taxpayers.

While advocates of liberty will applaud much of what is in this order, it will also be used to go after voluntary efforts by private companies, colleges, or professional groups that make distinctions by sex or other categories, even ones that I and others might find innocuous or praiseworthy. (Are efforts to keep men from dropping out of school teaching now going to be ruled improper sex discrimination?) One might argue that our quarrel is with the sweep of current federal antidiscrimination law itself.

Overall, the move underscores the case for Congress to act to roll back or clarify the prohibitions in various anti-discrimination laws, a task the courts should not be asked to accomplish alone with or without the use of constitutional law.

Many other questions about implementation remain to be answered. We can be sure that with the administration eager to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI) as such, new concepts and programs will quickly come along intended to accomplish at least some of the same aims while remaining in compliance (the compliance function itself, of course, has been central to the growth of DEI). I don’t see definitions in the order, and it will prove inherently difficult to draw some of the relevant lines.

Note also Sec. 7 (b), which says, “This order does not prevent State or local governments, Federal contractors, or Federally-funded State and local educational agencies or institutions of higher education from engaging in First Amendment-protected speech.” Perhaps this is reassurance on a point that courts would have insisted on anyway. But you could also see it as a warning to the administration’s enforcers not to pursue the order into areas where it would clash with speech rights, as has already been known to happen with state anti-DEI efforts. 

Separately, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management ordered that federal agencies close their DEI offices and place federal diversity, equity, and inclusion employees on leave no later than today (January 22), with termination in prospect. According to the Washington Post, “agency heads must ask employees ‘if they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language,’ ” in the words of the memorandum.

Matthew Cavedon

On January 21, the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the case Perttu v. Richards, now pending before the Supreme Court, arguing that prisoners have a right to have a jury resolve disputes concerning their exhaustion of administrative remedies.

Cato’s brief recounts how in this case, Kyle Richards, a prisoner, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit “alleging that Petitioner Thomas Perttu, a correctional officer, committed sexual misconduct against him and other inmates—then threatened Richards and destroyed the grievances he sought to file in order to exhaust his administrative remedies.”

Richards’ claims are subject to the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which requires inmates to exhaust prisons’ internal administrative processes before filing lawsuits. Richards alleges that he tried to exhaust these remedies, but Perttu destroyed his written grievances and threatened him against trying to file any more.

Without putting the issue to a jury, the district court determined that Richards had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies and dismissed his suit. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that Richards is entitled to a jury trial of the disputed facts concerning his efforts to exhaust his administrative remedies. The Supreme Court granted Perttu’s petition to review the case.

Cato’s amicus brief argues that Richards and other inmates are entitled to have a jury determine disputed facts concerning administrative exhaustion, especially when those factual disputes are inseparable from the merits of an inmate’s underlying claim. The Seventh Amendment guarantees Americans the right to a truly neutral fact-finder in the form of a jury in most civil cases, including those challenging government actions.

This protection is especially important when government officials, such as the correctional officers in this case, have ready means of thwarting citizens’ efforts to pursue their claims through the courts. The Constitution assigns to juries, not judges, responsibility for resolving disputed facts in criminal cases and civil cases involving common-law causes of action (including federal civil rights claims)—and for good reason. No less than other citizens, PLRA litigants are thus entitled to have their claims decided by jurors, who are the constitutionally appointed fact-finders.

Patrick G. Eddington

Sometimes when “secret law” is involved—and that is always the case with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—it takes some time before the public learns how badly the government has violated someone’s constitutional rights via the FISA Section 702 program. U.S. v. Hasbajrami is a perfect example of the phenomenon. Although Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall of the Eastern District of New York issued her ruling against the Biden administration on December 2, 2024, the actual decision in the case was not released until late yesterday, January 21, 2025. 

In brief, defendant Agron Hasbajrami was arrested on September 6, 2011, before boarding a flight to Turkey to, according to the federal prosecutors, “travel to the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan, where he expected to join a terrorist organization, receive training, and ultimately fight against U.S. forces and others in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” 

Federal authorities used FISA Section 702 evidence to secure Hasbajrami’s conviction, but only after Hasbajrami had been in jail did the Justice Department disclose to the court—for the first time—that “some of the evidence it had previously disclosed from FISA surveillance was itself the fruit of earlier information obtained without a warrant pursuant to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, 50 U.S.C. § 188 1a et seq. (‘Section 702’).” 

In this case, the 702 information in question on Hasbajrami was obtained by FBI agents querying the vast FISA Section 702 database, which Democratic and Republican administrations have argued does not require a warrant. 

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied Hasbarjami’s blanket evidence suppression motion for the exclusion of all FISA Section 702 collection in his case but did not weigh in on whether the warrantless Section 702 database queries were constitutional, instead remanding the case back to Judge Hall for a review of that question. Hall subsequently agreed with Hasbarjami’s argument that “inadvertent acquisition of Defendant’s communications does not automatically permit the government to search among the acquired communications without a warrant.”

If you read Hall’s full opinion, you’ll also see her call out the Justice Department for its “sparse record” of providing data in this case. That’s a polite way of saying that Justice Department and FBI officials were substantially less than candid about the facts of the case. You’ll also see entire pages of the decision are redacted, a reminder that key facts about the case remain hidden from the public.

In commenting on the case, the ACLU’s Patrick Toomey noted, “While the new opinion holds that the FBI’s Section 702 queries violated the Fourth Amendment, the court ultimately denied the defendant’s motion to suppress the resulting evidence on separate grounds.” 

Hasbarjami will thus remain behind bars. But his success in this case in getting Judge Hall to rule that FISA Section 702 warrantless “back door” searches violate the Fourth Amendment has reopened the issue. 

Will the new Trump administration appeal the decision? 

Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi testified under oath at her confirmation hearing that she supported the FISA Section 702 program, though the issue of warrantless “back door” searches did not come up as I recall. Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) nominee Tulsi Gabbard has gone from FISA Section 702 opponent to supporter in record time. Assuming Gabbard gets a confirmation hearing, asking her about Hall’s ruling should be the first question posed to her.

Jeffrey A. Singer

On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO). This sets in motion a 12-month notice period during which the US will wind down funding of WHO operations. The US provides more funds to the WHO than any other participating country. From 2022 to 2023, the US provided the organization with $1.284 billion in funds. The US accounted for 22 percent of the agency’s funding in 2024.

Addressing public health issues is a legitimate function of the government. A central tenet of the liberal tradition is the harm principle, elucidated by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, Mill wrote, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

As Mill articulated, the harm principle justifies government intervention to prevent harm to others. In public health, this includes combating contagious diseases and regulating pollution.

In today’s globally interconnected society, where people and goods move rapidly worldwide, a global public health agency is legitimate and necessary. Cooperating with such an agency to reduce the spread of deadly communicable and infectious diseases that can come to our shores is putting America first. However, that agency need not be the WHO.

The WHO has done a lot of good when it has stuck to its original mission. Its immunization and surveillance program launched in 1967 helped eradicate smallpox. A recent report in The Lancet estimates that the WHO’s Expanded Program on Immunization, begun in 1974, may have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past 50 years, the majority of which were infants. Its Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISR) helps the US and other countries plan for influenza outbreaks, including preparing vaccines for future outbreaks.

Unfortunately, the WHO has expanded its mission over the years to areas that only tangentially relate to public health, such as issuing alcohol consumption and dietary guidelines. Such issues are more aptly defined as private health, i.e., matters that don’t cause harm to others.

But US public health agencies have done the same. As I have written here, US public health agencies’ mission creep has extended to include recommendations to lawmakers on gun control, physicians on how to treat pain, parents and teens on safely consuming social media, and parents on how to reduce the stress of childrearing. This mission creep is politically divisive, redirects agency resources away from legitimate functions, and causes agencies to take on too many roles, often failing to execute any of them effectively.

The WHO is also not immune to politicization. Critics, including some governments and public health experts, alleged that the WHO was overly deferential to China’s narrative about the virus, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic. They suggested that the WHO relied too heavily on China’s initial reporting, which downplayed the severity and transmissibility of the virus. The WHO initially echoed China’s claims that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, which it later revised. The WHO’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in China lacked transparency and independence, with former US Representative Brad Wenstrup alleging that the organization allowed China to influence the scope and findings of the inquiry.

While the WHO has faced criticism for politicization and mission creep, US public health agencies bear responsibility for their own shortcomings. Several public health agencies have engaged in scientific gatekeeping to suppress dissent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Food and Drug Administration, in particular, has shown a troubling pattern of bureaucratic inertia and politicized decision-making, as seen during the pandemic and in its handling of innovative treatments. In our white paper, Drug Reformation, Michael F. Cannon and I show how the FDA stifles pharmaceutical innovation, contributes to rising health care spending, and infringes on patient autonomy and the right to self-medicate.

The FDA has maintained barriers to women obtaining over-the-counter birth control despite physician specialty organizations calling for decades for the agency to remove them. It took 14 years and a federal court order for the agency to remove obstacles to all women seeking emergency contraception. It dragged its feet for years while people died of opioid overdoses until finally letting people obtain the antidote naloxone over the counter in 2023. It is currently delaying veterans’ access to MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder despite clinical research demonstrating the drug’s impressive efficacy.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the virus was spreading rapidly and fatalities mounted, the WHO swiftly distributed effective test kits developed abroad to people in the rest of the world while Americans waited months for the FDA to allow them to access test kits.

Over the next twelve months, should the US decide to rejoin the WHO, it should leverage its influence to insist on transparency and accountability within the organization and the agency returning to its original mission. Otherwise, the US should pursue other global public health arrangements that meet these requirements.

The Trump administration must also address mission creep, politicization, and glaring inefficiencies in US public health institutions. That includes ridding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of mission creep, considering the elimination of the Office of the Surgeon General, and abolishing the FDA.

Adam N. Michel

President Donald Trump issued a flurry of Executive Orders (EOs) on January 20, his first day in office. One of the orders instructed government officials to “notify the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] that any commitments made by the prior administration on behalf of the United States with respect to the Global Tax Deal have no force or effect within the United States.” The notice is a welcome relief from the Biden Treasury Department’s relentless advocacy for a global tax system that would raise taxes on and depress investment by American businesses.

The OECD’s sprawling global tax effort comprises two pillars, which, taken together, threaten higher and more complicated taxes. Pillar One redistributes hundreds of billions of multinational corporate profits to countries based on customer location, regardless of a company’s physical location—upending critical protections against extraterritorial taxation. Pillar Two consists of a series of new complicated rules that enforce a global minimum tax of 15 percent and undermine the economic success of the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

Although Congress had not adopted any of the OECD rules, the Biden administration was actively coercing other countries to adopt them to create the sense that the deal was a fait accompli. Trump’s EO will help turn the tide, allowing other reticent countries to delay implementation or follow America’s lead in abandoning the entire project.

While the EO is a good start, there is more for the president and Congress to do. Under Section 2 of the EO, the Secretary of the Treasury is instructed to deliver findings and recommendations to the president on options to protect American businesses from discriminatory and extraterritorial taxes. In those findings, the secretary should recommend that the president:

Notify tax treaty partners that the United States considers the Pillar Two rules to violate existing treaty language.
Repeal country-by-country reporting regulations and stop taxpayer information exchange programs with any country implementing Pillar Two.
Withdraw the Obama-era endorsement of the protocol amending the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters on bulk taxpayer information exchange.
Instruct all agencies providing Part 2 voluntary OECD contributions to ensure no US funding supports work on the global tax deal.

Congress must also take decisive action to support President Trump’s executive actions and make it more difficult for future global tax projects to start.

Congress should:

Cut US funding for the Part 1 core budget and Part 2 voluntary contributions to the OECD.
Instruct the president to immediately notify the OECD and France, its depository government, that the United States will terminate the application of the Convention on the OECD and the convention’s protocols.
Repeal the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010.
Exempt all foreign-sourced income from US tax laws.
Deliver on Trump’s promise to cut the federal corporate tax rate to 15 percent and allow full business expensing for domestic investments. Cutting the rate further would directly undercut the OECD’s project to enforce a global minimum tax of 15 percent.

The best way to undermine the OECD Global Tax Deal is by taking active steps to make the United States the most attractive place in the world to invest, build, and expand businesses. Instead of defaulting to retaliatory tariffs or other targeted tax hikes, Congress and the administration can stop the Global Tax Deal by defunding the OECD, enforcing existing treaties, and cutting taxes on businesses investing in America.

This piece draws on a similar section of the Cato Institute Report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). For further reading, see my Cato Policy Analysis, “Bold International Tax Reforms to Counteract the OECD Global Tax,” blog titled “It’s Time to Defund the OECD,” and my congressional testimony for the Way and Means Committee, “From Global Growth to Redistribution: The OECD’s Agenda to Tax American Success.”

Andrew Gillen

For the first time in decades, there is a promising window of opportunity to get the government out of the student loan business. A new briefing paper provides more background and explanation of the opportunity, but the case rests on four key points.

Private lending for student loans would be better

While we currently use a government-as-lender system, utilizing private lenders would be better. There are five main advantages of private lending compared to our government-as-lender system.

First, private lenders would finance less malinvestment. The government makes many loans that should not be made, including to students who are unprepared for college to attend substandard colleges. Since these loans are unlikely to be repaid, private lenders would lose money on them and cease making such loans, whereas the government continues to make similar loans year after year.

Second, private lending would hold colleges accountable. Colleges have little to lose from enrolling students, even if it leaves the students and government worse off because they get paid upfront and get to keep that money even if the student fails to repay the government. This lack of accountability encourages colleges to game the system. But to avoid losing money, private lenders would hold colleges accountable for outcomes.

Third, private lending would provide better incentives for students. While the government charges all students the same interest rate, for private lenders, students who study hard would present less risk and would be rewarded with better loans with lower interest rates.

Fourth, private lending would provide better incentives for colleges. Colleges that improve would benefit from their students’ higher repayment rates, which lenders would reward by offering lower interest rates.

Fifth, private lending would facilitate more informed decision-making. Government loans come with the same interest rate regardless of the quality of the college or the labor market for the field of study. However, private lenders would offer lower interest rates for better colleges and fields with plentiful jobs available. This would provide students with valuable information about the riskiness of different educational choices.

Flawed government accounting historically prevented the switch to private lending

But even though private lending would be better, we were stuck with government lending due to flawed accounting. Government lending has historically been forecast to generate profits. For example, in 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated a profit of five cents for every dollar lent.

This accounting was flawed for two reasons. First, it used the wrong discount rate, which overestimated the value of future loan repayments. For example, if the government charged an interest rate of 5 percent but used a 3 percent discount rate, government lending looks very profitable. Second, it failed to account for economic (e.g., recessions) and political risks (e.g., loan forgiveness initiatives). Indeed, a recent Government Accountability Office study documented that the cost of student loans has been dramatically underestimated. While lending was estimated to generate a profit of six cents for every dollar lent, the government ended up losing eight cents for every dollar lent.

Unfortunately, government accounting focuses on unreliable initial estimates (which project profits) rather than the after-the-fact reality, which entails losses. This means that even though transitioning to private lending would save the government money in reality, on paper, it would entail forgoing profits, which in turn means that politicians would need to raise taxes, cut other spending, or increase the deficit. These unappealing options have stymied efforts to transition to private lending.

But government lending is now losing money

The Biden administration repeatedly tried to enact mass student loan forgiveness. Some of its plans were stymied by the courts. But others were enacted or are still being litigated, and those affect government estimates for student loans going forward. This means that as a result of the Biden administration’s overreach, even flawed government accounting indicates that the government loses money on student loans now. The latest estimates indicate that the government will lose 19 cents for every dollar lent over the next decade.

Transitioning to private lending is now politically feasible

The fact that the government is losing money on student loans means that transitioning from government lending to private lending is now much more politically feasible. Instead of having to forgo “profits,” transitioning would now save the government around $212 billion over the next ten years, savings that could be used to cut taxes or finance other spending. But Congress needs to act quickly. If courts throw out the rest of the Biden administration’s changes to student loans, or if the Trump administration rescinds them, much of the savings will disappear, and the best chance to get the government out of the student loan business in decades will be lost. 

For more details, see our new briefing paper. 

Adam N. Michel

At the end of 2017, Republicans cut and reformed nearly every major portion of the US tax code through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Most of those changes expire at the end of this year, when taxes increase automatically, hitting Americans at every income level with higher taxes.

The following explainer begins with an overview of the individual tax cuts, reviews the business tax cuts’ economic benefits, and then discusses fiscal consequences. The end of the blog includes summaries of the law’s most significant changes.

This is the second part of a four-part series based on notes from a Cato congressional fellowship series covering the US federal tax code. You can read part one on Tax Code 101 here.

Individual Tax Cuts

The TCJA’s changes for individuals were primarily about cutting tax bills and simplifying taxpaying. This was accomplished by lowering tax rates, expanding tax brackets, limiting itemized deductions, and consolidating family subsidies. Almost all the individual tax changes expire at the end of 2025.

When the law passed, the Tax Policy Center estimated that 80 percent of taxpayers received an average tax cut of about $1,600. Fifteen percent saw no change in taxes, and 5 percent paid higher taxes in 2018 than in 2017.

Because the highest-income Americans pay the vast majority of income taxes, they also benefited from the largest dollar value tax cuts and as a share of the total tax cut. However, a more informative way to measure the tax change shows that the lowest-income Americans experienced the largest tax cuts as a portion of what people were already paying.

Figure 1 uses IRS data from before and after the TCJA to show that the largest tax cuts went to Americans in the bottom 75 percent of income earners. The lowest-income 50 percent of individuals saw a 9.3 percent reduction in their tax bill, compared to a 0.04 percent tax cut for the highest-income 1 percent.

Business Tax Cuts

The TCJA’s business tax cuts were designed to boost domestic investment and support long-run economic growth, wage gains, and job creation. The changes included a permanently lower corporate tax rate, temporary immediate investment deductions, and permanent reforms to the international tax system.

Estimates of the law’s economic effects from independent organizations at the time of passage found that TCJA would increase investment and boost GDP by between 0.8 percent and 1.7 percent. Empirical investigations of the actual economic outcomes have confirmed the positive economic results met and likely surpassed early forecasts.

For example, Gabriel Chodorow-Reich and coauthors use variation in how the tax cuts impacted firms to estimate that the TCJA will result in a long-run increase to the capital stock of 7.2 percent. Other recent empirical work also shows a close association between tax cuts and higher investment rates. These results imply a positive overall economic impact larger than the consensus range.

Kyle Pomerleau and Donald Schneider show that in the years immediately after 2017, “real GDP, consumption, business investment, and payrolls grew more rapidly than expected” by pre-reform forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (Figure 2).

Tax Cuts and Deficits

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the TJCA would add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over ten years, combining about $4 trillion in new revenues and $5.5 trillion in gross tax cuts. 

The Tax Foundation found that accounting for the dynamic effects of economic growth, the ten-year deficit effect would be $448 billion, more than $1 trillion less than the official static estimate. These estimates imply the law could have eventually made up its early deficit effects by 2028.

Because significant portions of the law are temporary, assessing its long-term budgetary impact is difficult. Comparing current revenue trends to past forecasts is even more challenging due to unanticipated inflation, pandemic and trade uncertainties, new global conflicts, multiple trillion-dollar tax and spending changes, and higher-than-expected immigration. 

However, what is clear is that adjusting the pre-TCJA baseline for unanticipated inflation shows that actual revenues—with all the intervening events—remain close to the pre-TCJA trend (Figure 3). This reinforces the fact that the federal government’s rising deficits are neither caused by nor fixable with the tax code. Spending growth drives long-run fiscal imbalances.

What follows is a brief summary of the most significant changes made by the TCJA.

The Individual Tax Changes

Lower Tax Rates, Wider Tax Brackets. Under the new system, income is generally taxed at lower rates. The law retains seven brackets, lowered rates for all but the 10 percent bracket, and adjusted income thresholds. Table 1, from a Heritage Foundation report, describes the changes for single and married filers. The bill also made similar adjustments to the head of household status.

Additional reading:

How 2026 Tax Brackets Would Change if the TCJA Expires, Erica York

Larger Standard Deduction, Repealed Personal Exemptions. The law almost doubled the standard deduction to $12,000 for single filers and $24,000 for married filing jointly. In 2025, due to inflation indexing, the deduction is $15,000 and $30,000, respectively. The standard deduction functions like an eighth tax bracket with a zero percent tax rate.

The larger deduction was partially offset by repealing the personal and dependent exemptions, a $4,050 deduction (in 2017) for each member of the household.

Doubled Child Tax Credit. The TCJA increased the child tax credit (CTC) from $1,000 to $2,000 per child to offset the repealed dependent exemptions. Exemptions, like deductions, are more valuable for taxpayers in higher income brackets. Thus, the larger CTC for personal exemption swap increased the size of the child subsidy for lower-income taxpayers and reduced it for higher incomes. For taxpayers in the 25 percent income tax bracket, the pre-TCJA $4,050 exemption was worth $1,013 in reduced taxes. The change did not meaningfully increase the total fiscal cost of the child subsidy program.

For higher-income families, the income threshold for where the CTC begins to phase out was raised from $110,000 to $400,000 for married taxpayers. The refundable portion of the credit for taxpayers with no positive income tax liability was increased to $1,400 and indexed to inflation (the rest of the credit is not indexed). The non-child dependent exemption was replaced with a new $500 tax credit.

Additional reading:

More than Just a Tax Cut: the Case of Child Tax Credit Reform, Adam Michel
The Case Against the Child Tax Credit, Adam Michel, Vanessa Brown Calder

$10,000 State and Local Tax Deduction Cap. State and local taxes (SALT) are one of 14 deductions for taxpayers who “itemize” their deductions instead of taking the standard deduction. Previously unlimited, the TCJA placed a $10,000 cap on the deduction for state and local property and income taxes (or sales taxes) paid. The cap is not indexed for inflation and does not increase for married taxpayers.

The write-off is an implicit subsidy for state and local governments with higher taxes. Capping the deduction dramatically shrunk the disparate treatment of similar taxpayers in states with different fiscal policies. Most taxpayers impacted by the SALT cap still received a net tax cut due to lower tax rates, a larger AMT exemption, and other changes.

Additional reading:

Understanding SALT, Adam Michel
The SALT Cap Is Fair Treatment for States and Congressional Districts, Adam Michel

$750,000 Limit on Mortgage Interest Deduction. For taxpayers who itemize, the home mortgage interest deduction limit was lowered from $1 million to $750,000 of debt. Treatment of pre-2018 mortgages did not change. The home mortgage interest deduction subsidizes larger houses for older, higher-income taxpayers and is not associated with higher homeownership rates.

Additional reading:

Priced Out: Why Federal Tax Deductions Miss the Mark on Family Affordability, Joint Economic Committee

Other Changes to Itemized Deductions. The TCJA also limited deductions for personal casualty and theft loss, wagering losses, and other miscellaneous expenses. The limits to specific deductions replaced the overall limitation on itemized deductions (called the Pease limitation), which reduced the value of a taxpayer’s itemized deductions by 3 percent of income over a certain threshold.

Combining a larger standard deduction and limits on itemized deductions shifted about 30 million taxpayers to the more straightforward standard deduction, saving them time and money. The share of itemizers fell from 30 percent to 10 percent after the reform.

Additional reading:

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Simplified the Tax Filing Process for Millions of Households, Erica York, Alex Muresianu

Higher Alternative Minimum Tax Exemption. The individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) is a parallel tax system that applies 26 percent and 28 percent tax rates to a broader definition of income after an income exemption (similar to the standard deduction). Taxpayers pay whichever is higher, the AMT or the regular income tax. The TCJA increased the AMT exemption and exemption phase-out, limiting the number of taxpayers burdened with the additional paperwork from about 10 million in 2017 to 1 million in 2018. The number of taxpayers who paid the AMT was 5 million in 2017, estimated to fall to 200,000 following the reform.

Additional reading:

The Alternative Minimum Tax Still Burdens Taxpayers with Compliance Costs, Scott Eastman

Doubled Estate Tax Exemption. The estate and gift tax (often called the death tax) imposes a 40 percent tax on the transfer of wealth, either as a gift during a person’s life or as an inheritance after death. The TCJA doubled the estate tax exemption from $5.6 million per person to about $12 million. In 2025, the exemption is almost $14 million per person. The estate tax forces millions of asset-rich families—families without a lot of cash on hand but with small businesses, farms, and other productive assets—to engage in complex tax planning to ensure that their heirs are not forced to liquidate their life’s work to pay a federal tax bill when they die.

Additional reading:

Repealing the Federal Estate Tax, Chris Edwards

Expanded 529 College Savings Accounts. Internal Revenue Code Section 529 Plan college savings accounts were expanded to cover K‑12 expenses.

Repealed Individual Mandate Tax. Obamacare’s tax on uninsured individuals was reduced to zero, effectively repealing the provision.

Business Tax Changes

Cut Corporate Rate to 21 Percent. The permanent reduction in the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent brought the US in line with other countries around the world. Pre-TCJA, US businesses faced the highest statutory corporate tax rates in the developed world (on their worldwide income), forcing more than 60 US firms to move their headquarters overseas in the decade before 2017.

When accounting for average state corporate taxes (about 6 percent), American corporations face a combined statutory tax rate of 25.6 percent. This is higher than the non-US Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) average rate of 24 percent and higher than China’s 25 percent rate.

Additional reading:

The Case for Trump’s 15 Percent Corporate Tax Rate, Adam Michel, Joshua Loucks

Full Investment Deductions. The normal income tax rules require businesses to deduct the cost of new investments over their asset life (between three and 39 years). These rules increase the after-tax cost of new investments because the real value of the associated tax deduction declines with inflation and time. Figure 4 shows that at sustained 3 percent inflation, the present value of a $1 investment deduction falls quickly for longer-lasting assets.

The TCJA temporarily fixed this problem by allowing businesses to fully deduct the cost of new machinery and equipment in the year purchased; this is called full expensing or 100 percent bonus depreciation. Beginning in 2023, equipment and other short-lived investments lose 20 percentage points of the 100 percent bonus deduction each year through 2026. In 2022, companies were also required to start amortizing research expenses over five years instead of the previous policy of immediate deduction. The bill also permanently expanded expensing for small businesses under Section 179.

Additional reading:

Expensing and the Taxation of Capital Investment, Adam Michel

New Pass-Through Business Deduction. Small and pass-through businesses pay their taxes as individuals and benefit from the TCJA’s lower individual tax rates. The law also created a new pass-through business deduction equal to 20 percent of certain types of non-salary business income. The deduction lowers most pass-through’s top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 29.6 percent. Certain high-income service providers are denied the deduction in the fields of health, law, consulting, athletics, financial, or brokerage services.

The comparable rate for large C corporations must account for the 21 percent entity-level tax and the 20 percent capital gains and dividend taxes assessed on distributed profits. Taken together, the total tax rate on corporate income is 39.8 percent. This simple comparison illustrates a more general finding that pass-throughs tend to be tax-advantaged over C corporations, although particular circumstances vary greatly.

Additional reading:

Section 199A and “Tax Parity,” Kyle Pomerleau

Limited Interest Deduction. The TCJA placed new limits on previously unlimited deductions for net interest expense. The limit is 30 percent of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). From 2018 through 2021, the cap applied to a broader definition of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). Moving from EBIT to EBITDA was an effective tax increase on capital and R&D‑intensive businesses. No other OECD country uses EBIT as the base for interest limitations.

Additional reading:

Tighter Limits on U.S. Interest Deductibility Make U.S. an Outlier and Increase Pain of Rising Interest Rates, Garrett Watson

Limited Loss Deductions. Businesses can generally use losses from one year (when expenses exceed revenues) to offset taxes in other years, called net operating losses (NOLs). NOLs allow businesses to smooth their tax liability over multiple years and help start-ups that may not earn a profit for their first years in operation. The TCJA permanently limited C corporate NOL deductions to 80 percent of income and prohibited carrybacks. Pass-through NOLs are limited to $305,000 ($610,000 if married filing jointly) in 2024. Pass-through limits extend through 2028.

Additional reading:

Business Net Operating Loss Provisions, Andrew Lautz and Arianna Fano

Shift Toward Territorial System. Pre-TCJA, the United States maintained one of the few worldwide international tax systems, claiming taxing rights to all business income, no matter where it was earned. Aligning the US with the global convention, the TCJA included a partial participation exemption (territorial treatment) with a three-part anti-base-erosion regime. The law also repealed the corporate AMT (although the Inflation Reduction Act reinstated a newer version) and imposed a one-time transition tax on international firms’ accumulated overseas profits, which was the subject of the Supreme Court Case Moore v. United States.

Additional reading:

Bold International Tax Reforms to Counteract the OECD Global Tax, Adam Michel 

Alex Nowrasteh and Krit Chanwong

President Trump issued an executive order (EO) on January 20 titled “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” wherein he declares that illegal immigrants are invading the United States and he’s responding by suspending asylum along the southern border, restricting immigration more broadly, and activating other government powers. Trump’s declaration of invasion gives this justification for such a drastic order:

The sheer number of aliens entering the United States has overwhelmed the system and rendered many of the INA’s [Immigration and Nationality Act] provisions ineffective, including those previously described that are intended to prevent aliens posing threats to public health, safety, and national security from entering the United States. As a result, millions of aliens who potentially pose significant threats to health, safety, and national security have moved into communities nationwide.

My research at the Cato Institute on crime and terrorism committed by illegal immigrants conclusively shows that they commit less crime than native-born Americans and have murdered zero people in domestic attacks since 1975. This post fills in the gap in Trump’s invasion declaration by analyzing how immigrants affect disease in the US. We find no statistically significant relationship between the size of the immigrant population, the illegal immigrant population, or the legal immigrant population and the spread of serious communicable diseases on the state level during the 2021–2023 period when America was supposedly being invaded by diseased immigrants. 

In other words, no reasonable disease prevention justification exists for the Trump administration’s declaration of an invasion.

Background

The US government should stop immigrants who threaten the health, safety, and national security of Americans from entering the United States. The first Trump administration closed the border during the pandemic by invoking Title 42, a public health law that empowers the government to prevent all people from crossing the border by halting legal entries and immediately removing unlawful border crossers to stop the spread of communicable diseases to the United States from abroad. 

Before the COVID-19 pandemic during Trump’s first term, some of his immigration advisors searched in vain for a disease carried by migrants to justify invoking Title 42. The pandemic justified such extraordinary measures that the Biden administration kept in place until May 2023.

When Title 42 was in effect from March 2020 to May 2023, Border Patrol encountered about 8.5 million illegal border crossers along the US-Mexico border. These aren’t individual crossers but the number of crossings encountered by Border Patrol agents. During that time, 46 percent of those were returned to Mexico under Title 42 authority—or almost 3.9 million. The major effect of Title 42 was to make the government seem tougher on immigration enforcement by dumping people immediately back over the Mexican border. But it also changed the incentives for illegal immigrants and caused more of them to try to cross more often. The result was higher numbers.

Prior to Title 42, illegal border crossers were detained for a period and sometimes charged with minor crimes like crossing the border illegally. Detention before Title 42 was a punishment and a deterrent to crossing again. After all, illegal immigrants come to the US for economic opportunity and often pay thousands of dollars or more in smuggling fees for the chance to work for wages 3–15 times higher than in their home countries. Every minute they spend in government detention imposes a significant cost on them, so detention is quite the deterrent to crossing illegally. Title 42 changed those incentives, lowering the cost of trying to cross the border repeatedly—and that’s what happened.

However, the political incentives were different. More illegal immigration caused chaos that voters despised, so politicians despised it too. The reaction to chaos was to attempt to reduce it through more enforcement, which often doesn’t work and can even make the problem worse. Title 42 was a textbook example of this. 

Initially justified for public health reasons, justifications morphed after the end of the pandemic from reducing the harm of COVID to reducing illegal immigration. By the time Biden finally ended the COVID-19 emergency and Title 42, other politicians who correctly and vociferously criticized him and others for the long duration and use of extraordinary anti-pandemic powers began to sing a different tune.

Senator Ted Cruz (R‑TX) called the end of Title 42 a “travesty.” Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (SC), Mitch McConnell (KY), John Cornyn (TX), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Chuck Grassley (IA), Mike Lee (UT), Josh Hawley (MO), Tom Cotton (AR), John Kennedy (LA), and Thom Tillis (NC) issued a press release that said:

We shudder to think about how much worse the situation at the border would have been over the past three years had it not been for the deterrent effect of Title 42. Over the past three years, the Title 42 order has been a lifeline to the men and women of Border Patrol, who have been working heroically 24 hours a day to secure our southern border amid the worst border crisis in our lifetimes. Even with Title 42 in place, illegal crossings at the border have been at all-time highs … Our border remains under assault. The resources of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) remain under tremendous strain. The introduction of 13,000 encounters every day to this crisis would be the equivalent of throwing gasoline on an already raging fire.

Title 42 morphed from an anti-disease measure into a border enforcement tool. Law enforcement fell for this, too, and the concern about removing Title 42 was palpable in the Department of Homeland Security during this time. That concern was unsurprising because their job was to enforce laws rather than think about the incentives for lawbreaking, but it turned out to be unwarranted. The number of border encounters immediately fell after the end of Title 42 and then returned to trend under the slowing labor market, which reduced the demand for illegal immigrants in early 2024, causing the number of illegal border crossers to fall.

This time, the Trump administration is not relying on Title 42 to close the border but is instead arguing that illegal immigrants are invading the United States because they could be spreading disease and danger by being insufficiently vetted. There’s no good safety or security reason to declare an invasion. Indeed, if it were a real invasion then the administration wouldn’t have had to declare it exists by pointing to insufficient vetting of illegal immigrants. We’d all know it was occurring. The imposition of such a serious declaration of invasion is fact-dependent, and the facts do not agree with those who support closing the border to stop the spread of disease.

Method of Analysis

If immigrants spread disease, then there should be a high correlation between disease incidence and the number of immigrants in an area. To investigate this hypothesis, we ran several two-way fixed effects regressions with state and year fixed effects and standard errors clustered at the state level. In our regression models, the immigrant share of the population is the independent (explanatory) variable and disease rates were the dependent (outcome variable).

We gathered state-level disease data from the CDC’s National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS), which tracks the occurrence of approximately 120 diseases and conditions. A notifiable disease is “A disease that, when diagnosed, requires health providers (usually by law) to report to state or local public health officials. Notifiable diseases are of public interest by reason of their contagiousness, severity, or frequency.” We excluded COVID-19 from the analysis. We then plotted the disease incidence rates with estimates of the immigrant population retrieved from the American Community Survey (ACS). We imputed the number of illegal immigrants using a modified Gunadi method to estimate the state-level legal and illegal immigrant population shares.

In addition to analyzing all disease incidence, we also focused on two serious diseases that may be widespread in immigrant communities and would be most likely to justify a public health emergency: measles and tuberculosis. Data for measles were also taken from the NNDSS, while data for tuberculosis prevalence was retrieved from the Online Tuberculosis Information System (OTIS), which is also retrievable through CDC Wonder. We focused only on the 2021–2023 period where data are available. In some cases, we can only analyze data during 2021 and 2022. We focused on these periods because they cover parts of the Biden administration that Trump’s invasion declaration is responding to.

Results

There is no relationship between monitored diseases and the share of all immigrants, illegal immigrants, or legal immigrants at the state level during the 2021–2022 period. Figure 1 plots the incidence of all notifiable diseases per 100,000 against the share of all immigrants on the state level. Figures 2 and 3 are the same analysis for illegal immigrant and legal immigrant shares of the population, respectively. They all show no relationship. Table 1 confirms the visual analysis: there is no statistically significant relationship between notifiable disease rates and the all immigrant, illegal immigrant, or legal immigrant shares of the population.

Figures 4–6 plot the incidence of measles per 100,000 residents against the share of all immigrants, illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants on the state level during 2021–2022. There is no visual correlation between measles incidence rates and any measure of the foreign-born population during those two years. 

Table 2 shows the output from our two-way fixed effects model, where we find no statistically significant correlations between any measure of immigrant shares of the population and the incidence of measles.

Unlike overall disease incidence and measles, there is a visually weak positive relationship between tuberculosis and all immigrant, illegal immigrant, and legal immigrant shares of the population (Figures 7–9). Interestingly, the two-way fixed effects regression results show that the positive correlation between tuberculosis and illegal immigrants and all immigrants is not statistically significant (Table 3). They also show that, with year and state-fixed effects, a one percent increase in legal immigration is correlated with a –0.542 change in tuberculosis prevalence per 100,000.

Discussion

There were no statistically significant relationships between immigrant population shares and notifiable disease incidence rates on the state level. But the figures for tuberculosis warrant a deeper dive into that disease. There were 9,633 cases of tuberculosis reported in the United States in 2023, similar to the same number in 2013. In the intervening decade, the number gradually declined and then cratered in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic when the health system was severely interrupted by COVID and immigration to the US slowed.

Between two-thirds and three-fourths of all tuberculosis cases are among the foreign-born, or 7,299 in 2023, a rate about 18.75 times higher for immigrants than native-born Americans in 2023. However, the number of annual tuberculosis cases among immigrants has remained about the same per year since 1993, when there were 7,414 cases. In the intervening 30 years, the foreign-born population more than doubled, and the number of tuberculosis cases stayed about the same, resulting in a decline in the rate of tuberculosis among the foreign-born from 34.1 per hundred thousand immigrants in 1993 to 15 in 2023. The correlation between the rate of tuberculosis among immigrants and native-born Americans over the entire period is strong because they were both falling. The real decline of tuberculosis in the US occurred among the native-born population, where cases fell from 25,102 in 1993 to 9,633 in 2023, or from 7.4 per 100,000 to 0.8 per 100,000. A decline in the rate of tuberculosis is evidence that that disease is not invading the United States.

Those individuals should be treated for tuberculosis, but there isn’t statistically significant evidence of them spreading tuberculosis to native-born Americans or other residents. The United States has long screened immigrants for serious communicable diseases and should continue to do so. However, Trump’s declaration of invasion depends on several facts about crime, national security, and disease that aren’t true. 

A new pathogen has not emerged overseas and there is no evidence of a known serious disease like measles or tuberculosis being spread by immigrants in the United States. The claims of illegal immigrants spreading disease are just as untrue as claims of them spreading crime and terrorism.

Patrick G. Eddington

Fulfilling a 2024 election campaign promise, on January 20, President Trump commuted the sentences of key Oath Keepers and other January 6, 2021, insurrectionists previously convicted of seditious conspiracy or other crimes in the breach of the US Capitol. Among those receiving a commutation was Oath Keeper founder and leader Stewart Rhodes. 

In the same executive order, Trump also issued unconditional pardons to more than 1,000 other individuals convicted or pled out for crimes they committed during the attempt to prevent the certification of then President-elect Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump. 

For these first two actions, the only rough parallel I’m aware of is the series of pardon actions taken by Presidents Lincoln and Johnson in the aftermath of the Civil War, and those primarily affected thousands of former Confederate officers and soldiers. 

The newly sworn-in chief executive also directed the dismissal with prejudice of all current cases pending for others identified as having violated federal laws during the attack on the Capitol.

It’s this last action by Trump that is the most noteworthy and radical. It represents a direct intervention by Trump in ongoing Department of Justice investigations into the January 6 attempted insurrection. 

No doubt Trump and his officials would argue that because they always viewed the January 6‑related investigations and convictions as purely politically motivated, dismissing the remaining cases is justified. Based on the plain text of the statutes used to successfully prosecute people like Rhodes, that argument—like Trump’s commutations and pardons—is as ludicrous as it is self-serving. 

Trump did not take these clemency actions in the interest of fostering national healing. He took them because the people who stormed the Capitol, wounded police officers, and threatened the lives of House and Senate members and Trump’s own vice president engaged in that violence on Trump’s behalf to help him try to stay in power in violation of the Constitution. Trump has now repaid their loyalty with commutations, pardons, and case dismissals.

The question now is whether these actions represent a one-off instance of Trump intervening in Justice Department investigations or just the first of other interventions to come. 

David J. Bier

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned against President Biden’s border policies, falsely portraying Biden as too lenient on border crossers. Regardless, Trump will enter office a second time with Border Patrol arrests at a lower level than when he left in January 2021. Illegal migration may fall further during his term or rise like during his first term, but whatever happens with illegal entries, the number of legal entries will undoubtedly fall much further.

Trump will likely cut legal entries more than illegal ones for five reasons:

That’s precisely what he did during his first term. Illegal immigration actually increased substantially during his first term, while legal migration of all types was reduced before and after the pandemic.
Legal migration is now much higher than it was at any point during Trump’s first four years. This higher baseline means that if Trump imposes limits similar to those we saw during his first term, the cut will be much greater than during his first term.
Illegal immigration is much lower than when Trump left office. Moreover, illegal entries are always much lower than legal entries, so even a small percentage cut from legal migration will be much larger than even a large percentage cut to illegal immigration.
Trump has repeatedly promised to impose even more severe restrictions on legal entries than he did during his first term (at least pre-pandemic). Moreover, his legal immigration agenda was never fully implemented during his first term, so we should expect much more serious cuts.
Trump has promised mass deportation, but this will be more difficult to achieve. It is far easier to end legal activity than end illegal activity, so he will attempt to appease his nativist base and the nationalist political class by cutting legal immigration.

Although President Trump occasionally makes statements in support of legal immigration, his advisors and most of his active political supporters are universally opposed to any effort to expand legal immigration, even for skilled workers. Elon Musk’s recent defense of the H‑1B visa ultimately concluded with him endorsing draconian restrictions on the visa (limiting it to 0.1 percent of skilled workers). In the next four years, no category of legal immigration will escape restrictions.

Illegal immigration is low

The figure below shows Border Patrol arrests under Trump and Biden through December 2024. President Trump entered office after Border Patrol made 43,251 southwest border arrests in December 2016. By the time he left office in December 2020, that number had risen to 71,142 arrests. He will enter office a second time with arrests at 47,326 in December 2024. In summary, illegal immigration increased during Trump’s time in office, but it is now at a lower level than when he left office and is comparable to levels seen in 2016.

Evasions of Border Patrol—known as “gotaways”—are also lower than when Trump left office. We don’t have data through the end of 2024 yet. However, it appears likely that they continued to fall even lower than the levels recorded in July 2024. Obama left office in December 2016 with 9,145 gotaways, Trump left with 22,569 in December 2020, and Biden will leave office with fewer than 13,000. Trump has little opportunity for serious improvements in border security.

Legal immigration is high

Here is the big picture for legal permanent immigration. The number of new legal permanent residents—which includes individuals adjusting their status in the United States—fell from 289,626 in the first quarter of fiscal year 2017 to 132,557 in the first quarter of 2021 during Trump’s term (a 51 percent cut). It had already fallen 12 percent by the second quarter of FY 2020 before the pandemic. 

The number has now risen to 395,411 in the final quarter of 2024. In other words, legal immigration is much higher than it was when Trump came into office last time, giving him more room to implement restrictions.

New permanent residents immigrating from abroad

Narrowing our focus only to those entering from abroad, Trump cut immigrant visa issuances (for permanent residents) by 78 percent by December 2020. By February 2020, they had already fallen 27 percent from the 2016 monthly average. Biden’s monthly immigrant visa issuances are already significantly higher than Obama’s numbers, hitting over 62,000 in October 2024—22 percent higher than Obama’s final result. Again, Trump will have to make further cuts than he did in 2017.

New refugees entering legally from abroad

Refugees do not initially enter as legal permanent residents but receive permanent status and may apply for permanent residence after one year. Trump will enter office in January 2025 with the Refugee Admissions Program resettling nearly more than 12,000 refugees per month in December 2024. This is a significant increase compared to just 7,371 in December 2016, giving Trump much more leeway to implement cuts than during his previous term. In December 2020, Trump cut refugee admissions to just 598—a 92 percent cut. By February 2020, admissions had already been cut by 79 percent.

Temporary work visa issuances

Between 2016 and 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of work-authorized visas issued by 51 percent. In contrast, seasonal visas (H‑2A and H‑2B for agricultural and nonagricultural seasonal or temporary jobs) increased by 25 percent, while all other visas fell by 72 percent. As of 2024, the number of work-authorized nonimmigrants has reached a new high.

Student visas

Trump oversaw a 76 percent reduction in student visa issuances from FY 2016 to FY 2020. By 2019, the number of students had already fallen by about a quarter. However, under Biden, student visa issuances increased to a level higher than any year under President Trump.

All temporary visas

An analysis of all nonimmigrant (temporary) visas—primarily issued to tourists and business travelers, temporary workers, students, and their families—shows that the Biden administration has managed to increase visa issuances to levels higher than in 2016. Trump oversaw an 82 percent cut in temporary visa issuances by December 2020. Again, the Trump administration had already restricted temporary visas issued before the pandemic—with visa issuances down 33 percent by February 2020 compared to the FY 2016 average.

Humanitarian parole entries

For decades, administrations have granted some individuals seeking entry into the United States, commonly known as “asylum seekers,” access to “humanitarian parole.” This policy expanded under President Obama, was restricted under President Trump, and expanded again under President Biden. Unfortunately, we can only estimate entries by looking at the number of “inadmissible” aliens encountered at southwest ports of entry. In October 2016, the number reached 20,000 before Obama’s administration restricted this form of entry. Trump restricted it further before nearly eliminating the program in 2020.

Parolees receive one or two years of legal status and work authorization. Entries at southwest ports fell 93 percent, from 15,161 in December 2016 to just 1,106 in December 2020. By February 2020, entries had already fallen 56 percent. Meanwhile, Biden increased the number to 50,050, primarily through the scheduling app CBP One. Immigrants can schedule appointments to be vetted and admitted as parolees at southwest border ports—up to 1,450 per day (about 45,000 per month).

Biden also created new parole sponsorship programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians, allowing up to 30,000 individuals per month to fly directly to the United States. This program started in October 2022 but was phased out by Biden from June 2024 to December 2024.

If President Trump institutes a level of legal migration similar to what he achieved just before the pandemic, visas and grants of status or parole would drop by 24.1 million over four years. If the pandemic level were imposed—which is possible but unlikely—it would be a reduction of 48.2 million. The numbers for permanent immigration would be between 3 and 4.8 million. For permanent immigration, in addition to work-eligible temporary workers, students, and parolees, the cut would be between 6 million and 10.9 million.

Trump’s second-term proposals

Trump has already endorsed ending all the Biden parole programs and CBP One app appointments, instituting a legal migration ban that affects an even broader group of nations than what he imposed last time, and suspending the refugee program. He is also likely to impose a low cap on refugee admissions again, which was only 15,000 at the end of his term. Given that the program has already admitted more than this number, it will likely be offline until October 2025, when the new fiscal year starts.

Trump’s advisors are also planning a pause on all visa issuances, which will create enormous problems, delays, and chaos throughout the system that will take years to resolve, just as the pandemic closures did (we are still dealing with those delays). He will undoubtedly impose new “extreme vetting” requirements. I call it extremely bureaucratic vetting, which seeks to delay and add new costs to processing visas. 

New biometric or interview requirements for green card and H‑1B applicants in the United States would create vast new delays for those programs, which again we saw last time.

These actions will happen very early, within a month of taking office. In the longer term, Trump has a lengthy list of policy proposals waiting to upend legal immigration further. The most dangerous of these is the public charge rule, which seeks to ban most low-income legal immigrants, including spouses of US citizens. Separately, Trump wants to impose a health insurance mandate for all legal immigrants. These two rules only briefly went into effect for a few months during the pandemic. 

For employment-based immigrants, Trump is prepared to introduce new wage requirements designed to price out all immigrants just starting their careers in the United States.

Conclusion

Although Trump likes to claim that his immigration agenda is focused primarily on stopping illegal immigration, his record indicates otherwise. He oversaw severe cuts to legal immigration while illegal immigration increased during his time in office. Illegal immigrants can hide and obstruct removals in many ways, whereas legal immigrants have little way to protect themselves from Trump policy changes. Stripping someone of their legal status requires little more action than the stroke of a pen. Trump’s anti-legal immigration agenda will increase illegal immigration and harm American prosperity.