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David J. Bier

Among the rampant absurdities about immigration that spread from both the obscure and prominent corners of the Internet, the idea that the Biden administration was “importing” voters from abroad to help Kamala Harris win was simultaneously the silliest and the most common. Setting aside the conspiracy theories, the 2024 election provides the best evidence to date that Republicans can compete when immigration is high.

For reasons I can’t appreciate, many Republicans act as if they cannot do well if there are many immigrants in the electorate. Vice President-elect JD Vance said recently that immigration would permanently tilt the balance of power in favor of the Democrats. He said this even as his running mate was poised to make historic gains among Hispanic voters, many of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants. Regardless, the historical evidence shows that GOP performance improves with more immigration, so there are no data behind Vance’s fears.

The immigrant share isn’t associated with a stronger performance of either party in presidential elections. But there is a relationship between stronger Republican performance and a larger immigrant share of the US population. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for 83 percent of the years from 1935 to 1994 when the immigrant share of the US population was below 10 percent. Since 1995, Democrats have not controlled either house of Congress 53 percent of the time.

Republicans have performed much better during the high immigration periods of US history. Why? Not only do new populations assimilate, but the more Democrats compete and cater to the votes of naturalized citizens, the more US-born voters drift toward Republicans. An additional factor is that the immigrant share has been high when the unionized share of the labor force has been low, possibly because immigrants undermine unionization. 

Unions were historically the base of the Democratic Party until recently. Any benefit from naturalized citizens did not outweigh losses among the unionized population.

Does this mean that Democrats needed to be even more anti-immigrant to win? That was Kamala Harris’s assessment of the situation. But my view is that her (and Biden’s) immigration gambit backfired. Polls show that from 2019 to 2023 the share of voters saying immigration should be decreased grew just 6 points. Even though illegal immigration fell sharply in 2024, the share of Americans saying that immigration should be restricted suddenly jumped 14 points in June 2024.

Here’s what happened: Harris and Biden endorsed a bill to “shut the border” in 2024, which they reiterated as their position repeatedly before finally acting unilaterally to ban asylum in June 2024. It’s no surprise that when the heads of both parties endorse immigration restrictions, more people move toward that position. We have seen similar swings on other issues, like trade, when the head of a party (Trump) suddenly endorses a different view. Rather than neutralizing Trump’s immigration attacks, Harris’s flip validated them.

As I explained in this short documentary about Harris and immigration, voters were told by Harris and Biden that we should want Trump-style policies at the border. But if Trump’s policies are what we need, why would voters elect Harris instead of Trump himself? It was such a poor strategy that Harris had to stammer her way through interviews on the topic and then try to distract Trump about crowd sizes in the debate to avoid letting him make the point.

Even if immigration was never going to be a strong point for Harris, she should have tried to attack Trump on his weak points to make it less of a liability. As I wrote for NBC in August, Harris had lines of attack against Trump, but never used them:

I have written extensively about how his policies led to less security, more evasions of the Border Patrol, more criminals crossing, and more criminals being released. She never made any effort to criticize his record at all.
When asked why she supported banning prosecutions for illegal entry, she refused to mention she did so only because Trump was using the authority to separate little children from their parents—a policy that was not popular with Americans. 
She should have mentioned that family separation prosecutions were causing sex offenders to go unprosecuted.
Harris should have done more to differentiate herself from other Democrats who support New York City’s insane shelter policy and release policy for criminal noncitizens.
Harris and Biden refused to make a positive economic case for any immigration. Harris cited economic analyses saying that her administration would accumulate less debt or more economic growth but never mentioned that this was largely because those models assumed higher immigration rates. The Congressional Budget Office concluded in July 2024 that the recent immigration will increase US GDP by $9 trillion and reduce deficits by $1 trillion over a decade. But since Harris had committed to her anti-immigration strategy, she could never attack Trump’s mass deportation plans as bad economics.

Of course, President Biden did not go nearly far enough in encouraging legal immigration. An arbitrary limit on legal immigration is the root cause of illegal immigration and border chaos. Harris was never in charge of immigration policy. But when asked what she would have done differently from Biden, rather than saying, “I can’t think of anything,” she should have said, “I would have required people to come legally and created clear ways for them to do so from Day 1 of my administration.” As we at Cato have often said, people want order at the border. 

Harris likely would have lost no matter what she did or said about immigration. But the fact that there was an alternative approach out there should give commentators pause before suggesting she needed to lead with even more anti-immigration messaging. 

Both parties can compete in a country with more immigrants, but no matter the politics, immigration remains important for the United States and the world. Congress and Donald Trump should focus on making immigration legal and orderly rather than on cutting it.

Jeffrey A. Singer

As philosopher Jessica Flanigan pointed out in her book Pharmaceutical Freedom, autonomous adults have the fundamental right to self-medicate. Michael Cannon and I wrote in our white paper Drug Reformation, that Congress recognized the need to respect the right to self-medicate as recently as 1938, when lawmakers venerated that right even as they unintentionally undermined it by passing the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

Alas, many decades have passed since policymakers and pundits have given even a slight nod to the right to self-medicate. And yesterday, voters in four states demonstrated how democracy and freedom are not synonymous. A majority of voters democratically chose to continue making it a crime for people to consume marijuana for nonmedical purposes, and in one of those states, they kept it a crime for people to consume psychedelics for medicinal or nonmedicinal purposes.

North Dakota, South Dakota, and Florida asked voters to remove barriers to people consuming marijuana recreationally. Yesterday they said no. In Nebraska, a majority of voters decided to stop preventing their fellow adults from consuming marijuana but only if they consume it for medical reasons.

A majority of voters in Massachusetts chose to continue infringing on the right of Massachusetts adults to consume psychedelics. There, Question 4 would have removed barriers to adults consuming, possessing, cultivating, and distributing (but only for free) psilocybin, psilocin, mescaline, ibogaine, and DMT (the active ingredient in ayahuasca), and would enable clinicians to practice psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Decades of research suggest that psychedelics have great potential to treat depression, PTSD, addiction, and other mental health problems. An underground psychedelic-assisted therapy profession has matured over the past several years. Voters in Colorado and Oregon have removed some barriers to psychedelics, although Oregon lawmakers brought back some of those barriers earlier this year. Sadly, a majority of voters in Massachusetts opted yesterday to keep barriers in place.

Politicians and pundits sound alarms about threats to democracy. Too few of them seem equally concerned about threats to individual rights. Yesterday’s votes on adult consumption of marijuana and psychedelics demonstrated that, while the democratic process was alive and well, respect for individual rights and adult autonomy was lacking.

Michael Chapman

Many Western leaders, such as President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, say NATO expansion, including membership for Ukraine, is vital to Europe’s collective security. But an ever-growing NATO—spearheaded by the United States—seems to contradict what one of its principal architects, Dwight D. Eisenhower, envisioned for the organization. Further, proposed membership for Ukraine helped trigger Russia’s 2022 invasion, a war that has reportedly killed several hundred thousand Ukrainians and cost the US taxpayers $175 billion—so far. 

A wiser policy for peace, as Cato and other libertarian scholars have advocated for decades, is to abandon efforts to expand NATO, resume the withdrawal of US troops from Germany, and let Europe take the lead in its own defense. 

NATO started off in 1949 primarily to counter the Soviet Union and (in 1955) the Warsaw Pact. The USSR and the pact collapsed in 1991–some 33 years ago. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and a principal architect of NATO, wrote in 1951, “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.” Today there are about 100,000 US troops in Europe.

Despite Eisenhower’s benchmark, the dissolution of the USSR, and the end of the Cold War, NATO, like nearly all national security/​defense programs, did not end. It grew. In 1949 there were 12 NATO member nations and now there are 32. The latest members, Finland and Sweden, joined, respectively, in 2023 and 2024.

That expansion happened in spite of assurances from US leaders to Russia in the early 1990s that NATO would not move beyond the borders of Germany. As Marc Trachtenberg reports in a new Cato policy analysis, Is There Life After NATO? US Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990, that, “if the Soviets allowed a reunified Germany to remain in NATO and US troops remained in that country, the alliance’s jurisdiction would not move ‘one inch to the east.’” 

However, in late 1993 the Clinton administration decided to expand NATO to the east. Clinton’s team was well aware of the “assurances Gorbachev had been given in February 1990,” said Trachtenberg, but they were “determined to move ahead no matter how the Russians felt and no matter what promises had been made. The basic US attitude was that if Moscow did not like the idea, too bad for them.”

Those actions, along with others, caused the Russians to feel profoundly betrayed and humiliated. It produced “deep anti-American sentiment,” according to Russian expert Stephen Kotkin, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University. Diplomat and foreign policy icon George Kennan wrote in 1997 that expanding NATO “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” In 1998 he said expansion “would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves….”

Despite the concern, at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, the member nations agreed that “Ukraine will become a member of NATO.” Russian President Vladimir Putin subsequently declared that NATO forces on Russia’s border are “a direct threat to the security of our country. The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice.”

In December 2021, two months before invading Ukraine, Putin criticized the West, saying, “We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the east. You cheated us, shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion…. We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached US borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well.” 

Despite the war in Ukraine, which Russia appears to be winning, Western leaders are still pushing for Ukrainian membership in NATO and, apparently, further expansion of the alliance. On April 9, 2024, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO. Ukraine will become a member of NATO.” That same month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared, “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”

At the NATO 75th anniversary summit in July, the 32 members said Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to membership. “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” they asserted in a statement. “We will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.”

Commenting on the new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in October, President Biden said, “I have full confidence that he will continue to build on our work to create a NATO that is stronger, larger, and more resolute than ever in its mission to create a safer world for our peoples.” (Emphasis added.) Rutte himself said in October, “What we’re doing together is making Ukraine stronger, more interoperable with NATO, and better prepared than ever to join our Alliance. I believe that all this work clearly constitutes a bridge to NATO membership. Ukraine will join the Alliance, of course, when the time is right.”

That’s not wise policy, particularly for the United States.

“Kiev should be excluded because it is not in America’s or Europe’s security interest to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine,” said Senior Fellow Doug Bandow. “For most of America’s history, Ukraine was ruled from Moscow, which never caused anyone in Washington concern. Putin has shown no interest in expanding westward and warned against Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO because he did not want to face a war with the U.S. through the alliance.” 

“US officials should begin preparing for a European designed and led defense system,” added Bandow. “Eight decades after World War II the world has changed. … Europeans should take over responsibility for their own futures.”

Cato’s Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson write, “Membership in NATO encompasses a commitment by the allies to fight and die for one another. Partly for this very reason, its members worked throughout the post–Cold War era to avoid expanding the alliance to states that faced a near-term risk of being attacked. NATO leaders have also long understood that admitting Ukraine involves a very real possibility of war (including nuclear war) with Russia.” 

America must ”abandon efforts to expand NATO,” states the Cato Handbook for Policymakers (9th Edition).

In his policy analysis, Trachtenberg says, “The world will not end if the United States withdraws from the alliance. The Europeans, with a combined GDP (by some estimates) roughly five times as large as Russia’s, are certainly capable of defending themselves, and if America withdrew, they would have little choice but to work out some system for doing so.”

In his farewell address of September 1796, President George Washington wrote, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities … it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world….”

Washington was right then, and he is right now. Let’s end NATO expansion and bring the boys back home. 

Emma Hopp

On October 6, Brazil held its municipal elections. Over 150 million citizens—a number that is roughly 40 percent of the population of the US—were eligible to vote for their local leaders. On a national level, the Brazilian legislature is considering regulations to mitigate perceived risks that social media and artificial intelligence pose to the political process. These proposed regulations mark a notable shift towards the European-style approach of technology regulation and an overcaution around technology risks. 

Currently, Brazil is considering several regulations that would change the technology landscape of the most populous country in Latin America. In 2022, Brazil introduced Bill 2768 to regulate digital platforms, similar to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. This bill aims to identify certain companies as “gatekeepers” of the technology industry; however, the threshold is only $14 million in revenue to reach the designation, thereby looping in not only the largest US Big Tech players, but many more US companies, global companies and, ironically, startup unicorns in Brazil that the regulation seeks to aid. 

Success stories in Brazil like QuintoAndar, a platform to find housing, as well as the e‑commerce platform Nuvemshop are swept up in the broad threshold.

The Brazilian congress is also debating Bill 2630, known as “PL das Fake News” or the “Fake News Bill.” The bill establishes content moderation guidelines for social media platforms, including — as its name suggests — the criminalization of a type of content referenced only as “untrue facts.” 

On the flip side, the bill has a vague must-carry obligation for “journalistic” content and content posted by “public interest” accounts. While the EU’s Digital Services Act does not supply a definition of what constitutes illegal content online, it does defer to the member states’ individual laws and holds platforms liable for not removing content reported as illegal through the notice and takedown process. 

Both regulations encourage platforms to remove content that may violate provisions. This overcautious approach will influence the experience of American users.

As with Europe, Brazil’s movement towards a more restrictive regulatory regime has reduced its citizens’ access to technology. Earlier this year Meta decided to suspend its generative AI tools due to disagreements over the company’s privacy policy, and X terminated its service in the country because of a judiciary disagreement. 

Brazil judge Alexandre de Moraes issued a court order to take down specific accounts, which X declined to follow. After threats to arrest X’s legal representative if the platform failed to comply with the court order, X removed all staff from the country and ceased operations. Ultimately, the platform agreed to block the accounts de Moraes flagged, reinstated the company’s legal representative, and paid a $5.2 million fine to operate again in the country.

However, the saga still highlights the negative consequences that arise when the government uses a heavy hand in its regulatory powers over tech companies.

All of this marks a notable shift from the more American style and less regulatory approach to technology policy previously seen in Brazil. One of the most important examples of this prior approach is Article 19 of the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, reminiscent of “Section 230” in the United States. Article 19 protects platforms from civil liability in the case of content generated by third parties — except if the platform violates a court order to take down a specific, identifiable, and locatable piece of content within a determined period. 

While not as concrete as Section 230, Article 19 sets up an important system of immunization for platforms that host third-party content, supporting an important pillar of the Internet: a culture of free expression.

Unfortunately, the power of Article 19 erodes as the branches of government in Brazil take issue with the freedom the rule grants to technology companies, calling to chip away or entirely remove the shield with proposed legislation and resolutions. The Supreme Court of Brazil even held a public hearing on the constitutionality of Article 19. These actions are not unlike those of the United States, where Congress has considered a bill that would sunset Section 230 or proposed the No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act, which would carve out immunity in cases that involve generative artificial intelligence. 

Because of the nature of technology regulation, proposals such as the ones in the US and Brazil affect not only the users within those countries, but the global social media experience. The social media landscape will look different due to regulatory obligations that incentivize companies to be overcautious in their removal of content.

In both the United States and Brazil, with elections top of mind, many observers are discussing the potential impact of AI. Unlike the US, Brazil started regulating the use of AI in political ads earlier this year in advance of their municipal elections with resolutions by the court. Per Resolution 23.732 by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, political candidates may not use artificial intelligence to “create, replace, omit, merge or change the speed” or “superimpose images or sounds on [a] person.” It also bans the use of “robots” that simulate dialogue. 

As a result of those resolutions, Google updated its policy in May to remove many political ads on its platforms in Brazil. This illustrates what could happen in the US following a variety of legislative and regulatory proposals at a federal, state, and local level.

Brazil’s current and proposed actions have and will affect the technology ecosystem. If the United States creates a similar regulatory structure around artificial intelligence, they could likewise see a stifling of content. While the First Amendment prohibits regulation that may be legally allowed in other countries, it is still up to the regulator to interpret the definition of protected speech. This, in turn, could cause a chilling effect. 

Brazil’s recent response to worries about technology, including a shift to a more regulatory approach to policy provides further notice of the pitfalls. Platforms will limit their options in markets that choose to undergo broad regulatory decisions. Users will be left uncertain as to what their rights are online. These consequences impact not only large US companies but also local innovators who will struggle with new burdens to entrepreneurship and consumers who will lose the benefits of such innovation. 

As Brazil aligns with a more European approach to technology regulation, one wonders if other countries in Latin America will follow suit behind the largest economy of the region. Either way, the United States should be wary of the outcomes of Brazil’s technology policy stances as it looks to codify the same positions in regulation.

Gene Healy

Like most libertarians—and most sane Americans—David Friedman looks upon the Trump v. Harris contest with dread:

My opinion of the election is “a plague on both your houses.” Kamala Harris is an extreme representative of an ideology I have opposed for most of my life. Donald Trump has three major positions on two of which, immigration and trade, he manages to be even worse than his opponent. While I have some sympathy for his views on the third [foreign policy], I do not trust him to execute a consistent and competent alternative. His disinterest in whether what he says is true, extreme even for a politician, I find offensive.

…but then comes this confession:

That is my intellectual view of the matter. It is not my emotional view. Reading news stories and observing the effect on my feelings, I note that I am reacting like a Trump partisan. Poll results that look good for him make me happy, poll results that look bad for him make me sad.… If Harris wins I will feel disappointed. If Trump wins I will feel relieved, at least until the first outrageous thing he does.

Many such cases!

David Friedman’s libertarian bona fides should be beyond question (for my money, his Machinery of Freedom remains the best introduction to radical libertarianism). Even so, in some libertarian circles, what he’s let slip—an “emotional” preference for a Trump victory?!—could get you read out of polite company.

As it happens, I think you can make an intellectual case for Friedman’s forbidden feelings. And since I think polite company is overrated, I’m going to make that case here.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument about whom libertarians should root for, much less vote for. Like Friedman, I believe that when confronted with a choice between two people who have absolutely no business being president, sitting it out may be the most responsible option. Instead, it’s an argument about which of two electoral outcomes libertarians should dread more, and it focuses on the administrative state and the courts.*

*I’ve left foreign policy out of this assessment because, like Friedman, I lack confidence that Trump’s occasional paeans to restraints are a reliable guide to what he’d actually deliver. 

“Our Democracy,” such as it is, has degenerated into a judicial-executive dyarchy. We’re mostly governed by people nobody voted for: bureaucrats and judges. Who gets to be president matters because he or she makes judicial picks, staffs the commanding heights of the regulatory state, and uses “the pen and the phone” either to extend bureaucratic control—or gum up the works. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.

A Democratic victory on Tuesday means that the party of government retains administrative power and gets four more years to enact its ideological manias on an unwilling public. Because I believe that would be very bad indeed for individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, I can’t pretend to be sanguine about the prospect.

Tapping the Brakes on Administrative Rule

America in the 21st century is “a decaying republic with two emperors,” Ross Douthat observes: in our current regime, “the major controversies get settled by imperial presidents and jurists”: what kind of car you can drive, who gets to use the girls’ locker room, whether or not you’re on the hook for your student loans.

If Trump wins, I don’t hold out hope for deconstruction of the administrative state. But even a holding action against further encroachment of managerial rule would be a major improvement over the status quo. And, on the evidence, a Trump-Vance administration would settle most major regulatory controversies in a more pro-liberty direction than the available alternative.

For instance, new tailpipe emissions restrictions issued by the Biden EPA effectively mandate that the majority of new cars sold in America by 2032 will have to be electric vehicles. Trump promises to repeal the rule, and here at least, there’s reason to take him at his word. Last time around, the Trump administration “rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations,” and managed significant liberalization in other areas.

A Trump-Vance administration will also push back against state-sponsored “wokeness,” for lack of a better term. We tend to think of the identitarian frenzy that’s come over key American institutions as a spontaneous development: bad ideas the kids got from academia and brought with them as they got older. In fact, as Gale Heriot, Richard Hanania, and others have shown, the low-level Cultural Revolution we’ve been living through is downstream from public policy and backed by administrative power.

A Trump-Vance administration would hit “pause” on attempts to use federal largesse to promote DEI “loyalty oaths” in American universities. And it would likely pare back federal attempts to use the bureaucratically concocted concept of “disparate impact” to attack any practice—from school discipline policies to fitness tests for police officers—that disproportionately impacts minorities.

The new Cato Handbook on Executive Orders and Presidential Directives argues that the next president should ban “all statistical measures of discrimination and other disparate impact analysis.” Trump moved to restrict disparate impact late in his last term. The Handbook also calls on the next president to repeal Joe Biden’s first-day Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, which makes rooting out “systemic racism” a central organizing principle for the federal government. Trump will do that as well.

The ACLU is apoplectic about the prospect that a second Trump administration will repeal disparate impact, stop the weaponization of civil rights law on behalf of “historically marginalized groups,” and re-impose its “sweeping ban on trainings on race and gender discrimination by federal agencies, contractors, and grant recipients.”

They have reason to worry: lately, the federal judiciary has been pushing in the same direction: toward separation of race and state. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in SFFA v. Harvard, curtailing race-based admissions in higher education, presents problems for the DEI Regime on college campuses, the workplace, and beyond.

Meanwhile, Trump’s judicial appointments—including three Supreme Court justices and 54 appellate judges—have helped refashion the federal courts into a bulwark against administrative rule. Under the Supreme Court’s “Major Questions Doctrine,” articulated in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), administrative agencies can’t decide questions of vast “‘economic and political significance,’” unless they can point to clear congressional language giving them that power.

If you’re worried about the health of “Our Democracy,” you have reason for optimism: the extension of that doctrine, along with the repeal of Chevron, limits the ability of the president’s agency heads to enact sweeping changes in American life based on tortured interpretations of statutes never designed to permit them.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has a nice roundup of the Biden-Harris administration’s struggles under a reinvigorated judiciary. “All the President’s Legal Defeats” include:

Biden v. Nebraska, in which the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s plan to wipe out $600 billion in student-loan debt with the stroke of a pen. In July, the Eighth Circuit blocked another Biden-Harris student-loan jubilee, citing the Major Questions Doctrine.
In August, the Sixth Circuit blocked the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to reimpose “net neutrality” rules and a district court judge in Texas struck down FTC Chair Lina Khan’s sweeping ban on employee noncompete agreements for lack of statutory authority.
Meanwhile, six federal judges have blocked the new Biden-Harris Title IX order, under which the president serves as Commander-in-Chief of the Girls’ Room, with the power to set one rule for which kid goes to which bathroom across 13,000 school districts and 6,000 U.S. colleges and universities.

As the Journal puts it, that list of thwarted power grabs underscores “the degree to which the progressive administrative state simply disregards the law as its avatars seek to impose their will on Americans without the consent of the governed.” In a Harris-Walz administration, they’ll have a much freer hand.

Cruising Down the Road to Serfdom

It’s a mistake for Harris-backing libertarians to bank on recent Supreme Court decisions “mak[ing] major power grabs still harder to pull off.” The next president may get to fill two Supreme Court seats; the two oldest Justices, Thomas and Alito, were part of the 6–3 majorities in West Virginia v. EPA and SFFA v. Harvard—precedents that deserve to be shored up and extended. But as Harris reshapes the judiciary, the courts will provide less resistance to administrative rule and race-based public policy.

A Kamala Harris presidency would deliver plenty of both. In the name of “racial equity,” the Biden-Harris administration carried out a frontal assault on color-blind law, handing out debt relief, small-business loans, and even access to lifesaving drugs on a minorities-first basis. Harris will continue the project of reinventing government as a race-and-gender-based spoils system where the treatment you get depends on your Intersectionality-Scorecard ranking. Her campaign is currently trying to woo straying minority males with “fully forgivable loans” for black and Latino men. The only sign we’ve reached “Peak Woke” is that she’s dropped the term “Latinx.”

It does Harris too much credit to paint her as an ideologue, but what discernible views she has reflect commitment to the continued HR-ification of American life. “Paging through intelligence reports just weeks after she was sworn in,” the New York Times reports, the new Veep fretted over possible gender bias in the adjectives used, forcing an inquiry that led to “a new training class for analysts on how to judge and assess female foreign leaders.” She demanded “demographic breakdowns on Covid vaccination recipients[,] pressed the administration’s health officials to address gaps,” and “pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business.”

But whether Harris proves an aggressive administrator-in-chief or simply reads what’s on the cards she’s handed, the result will be much the same. “The administrative state is almost wholly an embodiment of progressive values,” two of its leading academic defenders acknowledge: “enacted through the leadership of the Democratic Party to help people in need, regulate business, expand minority rights, tax and spend, and address a broad range of national problems.” It has “a decidedly liberal tilt.” 

Indeed, in this cycle, 84 percent of federal employees’ campaign contributions have gone to the Harris-Walz ticket, with an even sharper skew in agencies like the Education Department (100 percent of donations) and the EPA (99 percent). A class of nonpartisan experts, this isn’t: Americans are governed, undemocratically, by a political class well to the left of the median voter—and governed harder when the Blue Team’s in control.

It’s surely not active management from Joe Biden that’s driving continued corruption of science through federal grants; compulsory Kendi-ism via EEOC attacks on fitness tests and criminal background checks in hiring; or spurring the NLRB to tell Starbucks it’s illegal to close certain stores or suggest to a barista “if you’re not happy [here] you can work for another company.” The regulatory state is a machine that goes by itself if nobody’s inclined to throw a spanner in the works. In a Harris-Walz administration, we can expect new heights of bureaucratic excess.

“Existential Threat” to Democracy?

Of course, one has to weigh danger against danger: if I thought there was a serious risk that Trump 2.0 would “overthrow constitutional democracy” or drag the United States toward dictatorship, I too would be ready to greet Harris and Walz as liberators. I don’t, so I’m not.

Elite discourse on this subject has become utterly unhinged: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending,” Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post; “If we [journalists] are the ‘enemy within,’ that means we go to the camps too,” fantasizes Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong Fast. “TAKE TRUMP AT HIS WORD,” the New York Times editorial board demands in a four-alarm editorial, blaring in Boomer-uncle ALLCAPs across the full front page of last Sunday’s Opinion section: “DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES, ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS…” and so on. Inside, you get a litany of actions Trump also threatened to take in his first term but didn’t, each followed by the red-lettered exhortation: “Believe Him.“ Why, exactly? Because he identifies as an autocrat and deserves affirmation?

What if I told you that Donald Trump is an inveterate blowhard? Before taking him so seriously that you’re “literally shaking” about it, you’re allowed to look at his track record.

If you do, you’ll notice a distinct pattern: very few of 45’s authoritarian fancies—from unilaterally revoking birthright citizenship to “hereby order[ing]” American companies out of China—ever made the transition from idiotic tweet to nefarious plan. As I wrote in Reason toward the end of his term:

In each case, Trump basked in the resulting media frenzy, then did nothing whatsoever to follow through. It always ended up being a more unnerving version of “Dude: Let’s buy Greenland!”

Despite the rhetorical sound and fury, in practice Trump ended up a less imperial president than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Even on COVID-19—a workable excuse for an executive power grab if ever there was one—Trump proved the rare president willing to let a good crisis go to waste. It was his successor who seized on the pandemic as an all-purpose rationalization for rule by decree.

Obviously, it wasn’t self-restraint or constitutional scruple that stayed Trump’s hand. More likely: he has less interest in actually being a dictator than playing one on TV. Seizing vast new powers was never necessary to the performance, and besides, it would have been hard work for somebody lacking in self-discipline and a functional attention span.

The actually existing Trump administration was more “Veep” than “House of Cards”: more Berlusconi than Mussolini. The argument that Trump 2.0 will be radically different rests on the claim that the former POTUS has learned from experience: now he knows the right levers to pull, the right people to appoint to make the infernal machinery work for him.

I don’t buy it. This is a guy who installed John Bolton as National Security Adviser, looking for advice on how to stay out of stupid wars. Now we’re told he’s laser-focused on his mission of vengeance; if so, you’d think he’d have bothered to prepare for the last debate.

Look, I don’t relish the idea of pushing our luck by running this experiment again. I dearly wish the Senate had done its duty and constitutionally disqualified Trump from future office in his second impeachment trial. Even if January 6 wasn’t quite Pearl Harbor meets 9/11, it was still one of the most disgraceful things a president’s done in my lifetime. As various participants in Reason’s recent election symposium note, the 45th president “leveraged unproven fraud claims to attempt a self-coup,” “ginned up a mob of his fans to storm the Capitol building” and therefore “doesn’t deserve to hold office.” I agree.

But that’s not the question here. As I said at the outset, this is an exercise in political threat assessment: “Which of two electoral outcomes libertarians should dread more.” That demands a pragmatic assessment of the relative risks.

With Trump, the true nightmare scenarios typically involve renewed threats to the peaceful transfer of power. The passage of the Electoral Count Act has reduced the risks of another such attempt significantly, by clarifying that the vice president’s vote-counting role is ceremonial, raising the bar to electoral-vote challenges in Congress, and making it harder for rogue actors in the states to manipulate the outcome. Other commentators have floated scenarios in which Trump decides to ignore the 22nd Amendment and go for a third term. He’ll be 82 in 2032, but I suppose it’s possible he’d try—and wildly improbable that he’d succeed. In any event, that lurid scenario is a good deal less likely than the more prosaic threat outlined above: a reenergized administrative state, unburdened by what has been, under a Kamala Harris presidency.

Nor was January 6 the only state-sponsored atrocity of recent years. At the start of this decade, the public health bureaucracy mounted an unprecedented assault on normal life; even after the cavalry arrived in the form of effective vaccines, “young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development [and] dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones.” Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration used federal power to enforce conformity under the militant, illiberal orthodoxy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” What’s more, they carried out a massive, covert effort to suppress core political speech, which one federal court likened to an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth.” The ticket is unrepentant about that and ready to do it again.

In their understandable revulsion towards Donald Trump, some libertarians seem on the verge of convincing themselves that the Blue Team is basically the party of institutionalized niceness. Sure, they’ll overreach at times, but at least they’re not mean: their heart’s in the right place! I take a less benign view of what’s on offer from the party of government: left unchecked, administrative rule promises a tyranny of “omnipotent moral busybodies” who torment us for our own good and without end.

“A grim electoral choice” is right. If the question is, which side deserves to be punished on Tuesday, it seems to me they both do. The good news is, one of them will. Here’s the hopeful case that a Trump loss will be better, in the long run, for limited government, the country, and the Republican Party. Here, though it wasn’t so intended, is the hopeful case that some time spent wandering in the wilderness will lead to a saner Democratic Party. 

The bad news, of course, is that the only certain punishment is what’s about to be visited on the country itself.

David Kemp

In a November 4 blog, I discussed the economics of nuclear power in light of recent nuclear deals by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. While optimists envision an important role for nuclear power in a transition to clean energy, historical and recent experience with nuclear power and its continued high cost suggests that a more skeptical view is warranted. 

Of particular importance is the fact that though efforts to reduce the regulatory burden on nuclear power are showing some signs of success, subsidies to nuclear remain high. I argued that both unnecessary regulations and subsidies to nuclear and other energy technologies should be removed.

Given growing concerns about climate change, the key question for nuclear is whether its societal benefit as a zero-carbon electricity source is worth its large construction costs. If the answer is yes, then the benefits may justify subsidies or other government interventions to support the building of new nuclear power plants. A definitive answer to this question, though, requires knowledge of the actual damages of carbon emissions, which continues to be debated. 

In our 2020 working paper on the economics of nuclear power, Peter Van Doren and I ask an alternative question: What level of carbon damages would justify construction of a nuclear power plant instead of an alternative fossil fuel power plant? With the recent flurry of nuclear activity and legal and regulatory changes, it is worthwhile to revisit our calculations.

To do so, I compare the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of a new nuclear power plant and a new natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) plant under different assumptions. The LCOE is an estimate of the lifetime costs of a power plant expressed in cents per unit of electricity produced (kilowatt-hours, kWh). The calculation accounts for the construction costs, construction time, financing, fixed and variable operations and maintenance, and fuel costs.[1]

The assumptions for nuclear are based on a recent Department of Energy (DOE) report on nuclear power, though my assumptions differ in a few key ways.[2] In my last blog, I outlined why the DOE report is overly optimistic, which is reflected in its estimates of future nuclear LCOEs (see Figure 3 on page 4). Most importantly, it commits a common error made by many pro-nuclear projections. It describes the high cost of recent projects, outlines vague ways in which these costs will be reduced in the future, and then simply waves its hands and assumes substantially lower costs. 

The DOE estimates that the most recent US nuclear project (at Vogtle in Georgia) had a construction cost of $15,000 per kilowatt of capacity built ($/​kW) and took 11 years to build. It also provides LCOE estimates if construction cost and time are reduced by around 40 percent, to 8,300 $/​kW and 6 years. The most important factors for nuclear LCOE are construction costs and time (which affects the costs of financing), so such a large assumed reduction has a substantial effect.

The DOE also includes the effect of subsidies, including favorable federal loans and investment tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act. My calculations ignore these because: 1) the subsidies don’t change the underlying economics of nuclear power, they simply transfer some of the cost to taxpayers; and 2) as long as these subsidies are motivated entirely by climate change, their value is included as a portion of the carbon tax necessary to equate the cost of nuclear and alternative energy sources that I estimate below (i.e., a subsidy to clean energy is a negative carbon tax).

The LCOE of nuclear, at both the cost level seen at Vogtle and after assuming a 40 percent reduction in construction cost and time, are reported in Table 1.[3] Also included are the estimated LCOEs of nuclear’s primary alternative, a natural gas combined cycle plant. While nuclear is dependent on construction costs, the most important variable for NGCC is fuel costs. The LCOE of NGCC is thus evaluated at varying fuel costs based on Energy Information Administration natural gas price projections.[4]

Table 1 also includes estimated LCOEs for NGCC with 95 percent Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). This spring, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enacted a new rule requiring that new natural gas plants operating more than 40 percent of the time must reduce their emissions by at least 90 percent, with the EPA determining that CCS is the best system for reducing emissions. The rule is likely shortsighted and is facing legal challenges. However, if the rule goes into effect as currently envisioned, NGCC without CCS will likely no longer be possible to build. Thus, I also estimate the LCOE of NGCC with 95 percent CCS based on cost estimates from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

Overall, the picture is clear. Nuclear at either assumed construction cost and time is expensive. NGCC without CCS is much cheaper, and NGCC with CCS is slightly more expensive but still less than nuclear at any assumed fuel cost. How does this picture change if climate damages are considered?

The social cost of carbon necessary to justify building a nuclear power plant instead of the much cheaper NGCC plants is calculated using NREL estimates of the carbon intensity of the modeled NGCC plants.[5] The results, reported in Table 2, make it clear that, at the high-cost level recently seen in the United States, nuclear’s clean energy benefit does not outweigh its large costs. 

For example, for the construction of nuclear at the high assumptions (LCOE of 22.3 cents per kWh) instead of an NGCC with low assumed future natural gas prices (LCOE of 4.1 cents per kWh) to be justified by climate change the estimated damages of carbon emissions would need to be more than $400 per ton.

The estimates of the carbon tax needed to equate the LCOEs of NGCC without CCS and nuclear at the assumed low-cost level are closer and in line with recent federal estimates of the social cost of carbon ($190 per metric ton in 2020 dollars), though the assumptions behind those estimates are up for debate. Of course, whether those construction costs and times are even achievable is also doubtful.

When NGCC with CCS is considered, the required assumed costs of carbon damages are enormous because the modeled natural gas plants are emitting only 5 percent of the carbon emitted by the plant without CCS. Of course, CCS technology is still unproven, so the cost estimates are theoretical (and highly controversial in their own right) and exclude important factors like the transport and storage of the captured carbon emissions. Ironically, prospects for either CCS or nuclear may end up depending on how economically infeasible the other is.

Overall, this analysis highlights two points. First, nuclear will require substantial cost reductions before it is worth investing in, whether its clean energy benefit is considered or not. Second, our current web of subsidies and regulations makes it difficult to evaluate the benefits and costs of various energy sources. The complexity restricts our ability to optimize energy sources considering a range of factors including cost, reliability, and environmental damages. We should stop favoring certain sources through subsidies and punishing others through regulation, and, if necessary, find ways to directly price in unquantified costs and benefits.

Kayla Susalla

The juvenile justice system is distinct from the adult system because it accounts for youth making impulsive decisions due to hormonal changes, lack of experiential learning, and still-developing brains. External factors such as dysfunctional family dynamics and other environmental influences can compound these difficulties. With many factors at play during adolescence, the juvenile justice system is intended to take a primarily rehabilitative approach and divert kids from the adult system through counseling referrals and diversion programs. However, policies that increase kids’ contact with the legal system have become more popular over the years, especially the placement of police in schools.

Studies analyzing the effects of school police on student arrest rates are scarce and often restricted to small samples, making results hard to generalize. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has helped reduce this gap by comparing public schools with and without school police using a nationally representative sample from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and the School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSCS) for the 2015–16 and 2017–18 school years.

The GAO estimated that schools with a police officer present at least once a week had arrest rates 218 percent higher than similar schools without police, and referrals to police 137 percent higher, even after controlling for such variables as the presence of gang activity, racial makeup of schools, neighborhood crime, school location, and school disorder. 

“School disorder” includes the reported frequency of student racial/​ethnic tensions, verbal abuse of teachers, classroom disorder, gang activity and acts of disrespect for teachers.

The GAO also performed a descriptive analysis of SSCS information, finding consistent results: In SY 2017–18, 29 percent of schools with police experienced one or more arrests, compared to 8 percent of schools without them. In SY 2019–20, 26 percent of schools where police were present reported arresting students, compared to an estimated 7 percent of schools without police. 

However, the report did not conclude whether adding police was associated with schools becoming safer, which is the goal of police presence in schools. (Notably, two SROs stopped the shooter in the recent Barrow County, Georgia, attack, likely saving lives).

A major problem is an unclear line between school administrators’ roles and police officers’ authority. Having officers on campus removes geographical barriers for administrators to consult police on disciplinary issues, especially when a part of an officer’s role is to respond to conflict. But when officers handle misconduct in schools with arrests, it can diminish arrested students’ ability to go to college, buy a home, or receive a job offer. School administrators handling misconduct does not. And school administrators, counselors, and other support staff are likely better equipped to address school climate issues due to their training and experience, especially for students with special needs.

Additionally, over-policing can be counterproductive in establishing positive relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve. For example, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office created an intelligence-led policing protocol using SROs to “look to identify students who are at risk of developing into prolific offenders,” which they define in part as students with one or more D’s, behind by one credit to graduate, or absent three to four times in a quarter. Labeling students using predictive measures undermines the presumption of innocence, shares unnecessary confidential information, and could make students less likely to trust authority figures at school. Tumultuous relationships between police and the communities they serve are exacerbated by officers’ use of force, which is understudied but has generated jarring videos filmed by students.

Police violence is a broader issue facilitated by weak accountability and reinforced by qualified immunity, which prohibits citizens from suing officers unless a prior case with identical facts found that an officer’s actions were unconstitutional. Indeed, qualified immunity has been used to protect school police from liability for breaking a student’s arm when the student was having an emotional episode and punched a locker, and for tasing a student with a disability when they attempted to leave school. In both cases, school staff would have been better suited to respond and avoid unnecessary harm to students. Police are incentivized to prioritize their own safety, and the system too often fails to hold rogue officers accountable.

The GAO report echoes findings from other research: placing officers in schools increases the severity of disciplinary measures. It is important for policymakers to consider these negative consequences when deciding whether to bring police into schools instead of letting staff handle discipline. The consequences highlighted by current research especially mean the federal government should cease offering grants to states to place officers in schools. 

Overall, additional research and reporting on how arrests affect students, more tracking of officers’ use of force in schools, and further analysis of whether police presence enhances school safety, are needed. The GAO report is a step in the right direction.

Nicholas Anthony

The European Central Bank remains committed to developing a central bank digital currency (CBDC), but it seems not every member of the Eurozone is equally interested.

According to reporting in Politico by Giovanna Faggionato and Ben Munster, “Several European Union governments, including France and Germany, argue the [European Central Bank] has gained too much control over one crucial aspect: how much digital currency citizens will be allowed to hold in ‘wallets’ backed by the central bank.”

The issue in question relates to concerns that a CBDC could increase both the severity and the frequency of bank runs. To remedy this concern, many policymakers have proposed setting restrictions on how a CBDC is used. For example, some proposals aim to limit the total amount a citizen may own while other proposals aim to limit how much a citizen may spend over time.

Policymakers generally hope these restrictions would limit how much money can leave the banks in a time of panic. Yet the issue isn’t so simple in practice.

If the limit is too high, it won’t be effective in curbing bank runs. If the limit is too low, it will prevent people from using the CBDC. In my book, Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money, I describe this issue at length as the “CBDC tradeoff” (a term first coined by economist William Luther). In short, the tradeoff is between making something people might want at the expense of the larger financial system versus making something no one will want and outright wasting taxpayer resources.

It seems European politicians are increasingly taking notice of the pitfalls that come with this tradeoff. Politico reported that European politicians are concerned that a CBDC would “jeopardiz[e] the stability of the entire banking system,” “infringe on personal financial freedom,” and “stok[e] fears of a ‘Big Brother’ state.”

All of these concerns are warranted. And considering that the benefits of issuing a CBDC in the first place are not clear, the CBDC tradeoff should be rejected altogether. That is, people shouldn’t be forced into choosing between two bad options.

Back in the spring, the House of Representatives passed a bill to prohibit the creation of a CBDC in the United States. At the time, some members of Congress objected saying that this bill would make the United States the only country in the world to reject CBDCs. Based on the debates in the Eurozone right now, it’s possible the United States won’t be the only one objecting for long. It may turn out that the United States carved a path for others to follow.

Are you interested in learning more about CBDCs? My book, Digital Currency or Digital Control? Decoding CBDC and the Future of Money, is available here. Also, if you are interested in learning about the status of CBDC development around the world, the Human Rights Foundation’s CBDC Tracker is available here.

Brandan P. Buck

Since the political ascent of Donald Trump, Americans have been subjected to endless think pieces on the “isolationism” that he purports to represent and threatens to unleash upon the postwar order. David French’s most recent column for the New York Times, “There Will Always Be a Trump. That’s Only Part of the Problem,” is the latest offering in this line of commentary. Like many articles before it, French relies upon a narrow understanding of American noninterventionism, derisively referred to as “isolationism,” and a simplistic understanding of those who proposed greater American involvement in foreign affairs.

As has become common in America’s mainstream news outlets, French provides a myopic history of noninterventionism, casting it as spiritually akin to all the evils of American history, thereby juxtaposing it against his own thinly veiled whig history. French laments that after being founded as the party of emancipation, the Republicans suffered from frequent bouts of “reaction, isolationism and xenophobia.” 

However, noninterventionism, what French blindly casts as “isolationism” (a long-debunked historical falsehood), had its roots in emancipation as well as slavery, nativism as well as assimilationism, and far deeper roots in the soil of American liberalism than French’s ill-defined reactionism. Indeed, looking back at the socio-political roots of organized noninterventionism, its proponents, largely in the Midwest, hailed from every corner of Europe. Be they Germans, Swedes, Irish, Dutch, or “old stock” from the British Isles, these immigrants and new Americans embraced the ethos of America First because they rejected the illiberal power politics of “the Old World.” 

German Americans, many of whom fled the militarism and conscription of the Prussian empire, settled in an American republic and vowed to keep it unsullied by the geopolitics of Europe, as the Founding Fathers had counseled. As historian Manfred Jonas argued, the “isolationists may therefore be regarded as the true heirs to the American tradition.”

By the time of the Great War, if anything, it was the interventionists, predominately industrial Northern elites, and a Southern planter class that had the deepest generational ties in the country. From President Woodrow Wilson on down, supporters of American involvement in Europe’s war openly accused their fellow Americans of disloyalty, cowardice, and malingering. The Wilson administration and its supporters used the private power of the noose and the public power of the courts to suppress American liberty at home in the name of fighting for it abroad. If “isolationism” had a “reactionary” element it was a realization that adventures overseas undermined liberty at home.

Of course, not every champion of noninterventionism from yesteryear or the present was a civil libertarian free of personal or ideological baggage. One of the leading noninterventionist voices that arose in response to the American occupation of the Philippines and took a stand to American involvement in the Great War, Representative Claude Kitchin rode to power on the back of a white supremacist revolt. And, yes, Charles Lindbergh, a figure who French invokes, held racist views that motivated his stance against American entry into World War II. 

Yet, history is challenging, for while figures like Lindbergh drew his opposition from the lowest of places of American life, he also argued that his fellow Americans ought not “to capitalize on the destruction and death of war.”

The various threads of American history, both admirable and contemptible, ran through the noninterventionist movement and often within the same people. In his effort to pull out the former while neglecting the latter, French simplifies the nuance of American history for contemporary political gain.

French’s command of foreign policy history is as tenuous as his knowledge of the history of those who opposed it. His article portrays the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, notably his primary victory over Senator Robert A. Taft, as a turning point, a victory over both “isolationism” and populism, a triumph that warranted Eisenhower “put his thumb on the scales.” However, like his account of those who opposed American entry into the North American Treaty Organization, he is similarly loose with Eisenhower’s views on the organization and America’s relationship with it. While it is true that Eisenhower felt compelled to enter the 1952 presidential race based on American foreign policy, he held more nuanced positions on America’s role in the postwar world than French would have his readers believe.

Absent from French’s account is the then-General Eisenhower’s assertion that “in 10 years, if all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.” French makes no mention that upon assuming the presidency, Eisenhower lamented that Europe was “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.” 

Finally, French’s article, glaring in its absence, makes no mention of Eisenhower’s reservations with America’s new role in the world, encapsulated by his famous farewell address, in which he coined the phrase, the “military-industrial complex.”

Whether it is his coverage of “isolationism” or Eisenhower, French reveals a lack of understanding of historical contingency and a deep disdain for popular sovereignty. While French stops briefly to note that “there were good reasons for reactionary populism,” citing the catastrophe of the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis, he does not linger there long enough to let such observations inform his analysis. Rather, he states that this latest turn towards “isolationism” is just another return to “base instincts.” There is no effort on his part to acknowledge the legitimacy of Americans’ anger over those foreign policy missteps and offer policy corrections to ameliorate their domestic impacts. One is left with the impression that John and Jane Q. Public are just supposed to suck it up and continue their deference to a foreign policy “elite.”

Instead, while he laments the reactionary tendencies of populism throughout American history and in our current political moment, he also declares that the “people are not always right” and require the “moral courage” of “leadership” lest Americans find themselves “led astray.” Thus, in this piece, French embodies the very detached elite that has given rise to the populism and “isolationism” that he so disdains.

French is right in one respect: there will always be a Trump because America has no shortage of Frenches.

David Kemp

Nuclear power is in the news again. Motivated by projected increases in electricity demand and fueled by federal subsidies to research and investment in nuclear reactors, tech companies have recently made headlines with major nuclear deals. Microsoft has plans to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, Google signed an agreement with nuclear company Kairos Power, and Amazon announced three nuclear deals with public utilities and X‑energy, which is developing its own reactor technology. 

Despite the flurry of attention, nothing suggests that the underlying economics of nuclear have changed. Nuclear remains expensive, and its costs likely outweigh its benefits as a zero-carbon energy source.

A recent Washington Post editorial, drawing heavily from a Department of Energy (DOE) report on pathways to deploying new nuclear power, summarizes the optimistic view of nuclear’s prospects. But to anyone who has paid attention to the United States’ historic and recent experience with nuclear power, the editorial and report are wildly overconfident.

The DOE argues that the US has the potential to deploy around 200 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power in the next 26 years, tripling the current US capacity of around 100 GW by 2050. Getting there would require a ramp-up of nuclear construction, with the best-case scenario envisioning deployment beginning in 2030 and reaching a “steady state” level of 13 GW deployed per year in 2041.

This is a pace that has never been seen. In China, where the most recent large-scale growth in nuclear capacity has occurred, deployment averaged 3.4 GW per year between 2014 and 2023. According to the DOE report (reprinted here in Figure 1), annual deployment in the United States, which has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, averaged 6 GW per year between 1973 and 1987 and peaked at 10.5 GW in 1974. It has since stalled. In the past 30 years, the United States has commissioned 4.6 GW of nuclear capacity, an average of 0.15 GW per year.

The slowdown in the United States (and similar slowdowns in other Western countries, including France, Canada, and Germany) was the result of cost overruns and construction delays, though the causes have been hotly debated. Peter Van Doren and I conducted an in-depth look in a 2022 working paper and concluded that ineffective construction management and the high level of regulation on nuclear power plants both played an important role. However, there is no conclusive estimate of the relative shares of the cost increase that can be attributed to each factor.

The most recent US nuclear construction projects were designed specifically to deal with the historic drivers of cost increases. Construction on four reactors at two sites (Vogtle in Georgia and V.C. Summer in South Carolina) began in 2013. The projects benefited from a large amount of government subsidies, loan guarantees, and risk insurance to offset cost overruns, and the reactor technology used was the first licensed by a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission process designed to preclude past regulatory impediments.

It was hoped that these and other features would help the projects avoid past pitfalls. They didn’t. The Vogtle reactors finally came online in 2023 and 2024 at more than double initial cost projections (around $32 billion compared to predictions of $12 to $14 billion) and eight years late. Construction at V.C. Summer was canceled in 2017 after $9 billion was sunk into the failed project.

By backing new reactor technologies, Google and Amazon are concluding that their chosen projects will be different. If these projects are successful, they would be incredibly beneficial. But these decisions are not simply private companies taking risks. We should be concerned about the role the government is playing in these decisions.

Historically, the federal government has taken a two-pronged approach to nuclear, imposing a high level of safety regulation while also providing a substantial amount of subsidies. Recently, efforts have focused on reforming the NRC licensing process, especially to allow for more innovative reactor designs. We should applaud any efforts to reduce overly burdensome regulation. But considering that the historic cost problems have also been caused by other factors, these efforts alone will not fix nuclear’s shortcomings.

Meanwhile, the level of subsidies remains high. The Inflation Reduction Act applied new tax credits to nuclear power while last year the DOE spent more than $1.6 billion on various nuclear programs. These policies socialize some of the risk that companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will take on if they elect to follow through on their nuclear agreements. R&D funding, tax credits, favorable loans, and subsidies don’t alter the intrinsic costs of nuclear, they simply transfer a portion of those costs to taxpayers.

Instead, we should remove both government barriers to and support for nuclear (and all energy technologies). If the calculus of nuclear makes sense to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they should take on the risk without taxpayers footing part of the bill.

Of course, the potential societal benefit of clean energy muddies the waters somewhat. But Peter Van Doren and I evaluated the economics of nuclear when carbon damages are included and determined that, with current nuclear costs and compared to a natural gas power plant, the benefit of zero-carbon electricity is vastly outweighed by the astronomical costs of construction. It would require a substantial reduction in these costs before nuclear is economical, even when accounting for climate damages.