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Jeffrey A. Singer

The Food and Drug Administration will delay a decision to allow Eli Lilly and Company to market its new drug, donanemab. Clinical trials found that the drug will “modestly” slow cognitive decline in people with early Alzheimer’s disease. The trials also found that the drug has a safety profile similar to Lequembi, a drug the FDA approved earlier that modestly slows cognitive decline. This decision surprised the drug maker.

Both drugs work by clearing away many of the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Pharmaceutical researchers believe it can take several years for plaque to return to its original levels after patients receive one year of treatment, which reduces the plaque to a targeted level.

Neuroscience researchers agree that plaques are associated with dementia, though they debate whether the plaques cause the disease or are the byproduct of a different underlying process. As researchers learn more about the mechanism and pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease, they may one day develop a completely different pharmacologic approach to treating it.

According to the New York Times, the FDA will ask an advisory panel to convene in a few months to address two primary questions.

One question is whether patients can stop receiving monthly infusions of the drug if the infusions reduce plaque to the targeted level and, if so, how long after the plaques reach that level.

The other relates to another protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s patients called tau. People with higher tau levels seem to decline more rapidly than those with lower or intermediate levels. Knowing more about tau levels may aid clinicians in deciding the optimal time to begin therapy.

Clinical researchers in the private sector routinely address these types of questions. Long after the FDA permits patients to access a drug, clinical researchers in academic centers and pharmaceutical labs continue to study it. Researchers seek to refine ways to administer the medication and are constantly on the lookout for unanticipated and long‐​term side effects. Clinical researchers also search for conditions for which clinicians can use the drug other than those the FDA permits the manufacturer to put on the label—called “off‐​label” uses.

As Michael F. Cannon and I write in our white paper, “Drug Reformation,” the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was strictly focused on safety. Drug makers must provide convincing evidence to the agency that any new product is safe for patients to consume as directed. When Congress passed the Kefauver‐​Harris Amendment to the FDCA in 1962, it required drug makers to convince the agency that a new drug was effective as well as safe. According to one study we cite in our paper, the proof‐​of‐​efficacy requirement added a median of 7.5 years to the time it takes to bring a drug to market. This requirement creates the phenomena of “drug lag” and “drug loss.”

Drug lag refers to the additional time the FDA’s proof‐​of‐​efficacy requirement forces consumers to wait before they may access a drug. Every day that the FDA adds to the drug development and approval process is a day that the agency denies consumers their right to access that drug. Drug loss occurs when pharmaceutical manufacturers choose not to invest in finding new treatments that they do not believe can recoup the considerable cost of securing FDA approval.

The arduous FDA approval process increases drug makers’ research and development costs while reducing the time remaining on their patents so they can recoup those costs. This is one major contributor to high prescription drug prices.

Once the FDA permits a pharmaceutical company to market its drug for a specific condition, the agency permits clinicians to recommend the drug to their patients for any condition they think it might help. Anywhere from one‐​fifth to one‐​third of all medicines clinicians prescribe and people consume are for these “off‐​label” uses.

Ironically, the FDA forces drug makers to prove that a drug works for condition “A” but defers to clinical researchers in the private sector and academia to determine whether it works for conditions “B through Z.” Why doesn’t the FDA defer to clinicians for condition “A”?

Congress was wrong when it added proof‐​of‐​efficacy to the FDA’s proof‐​of‐​safety requirements. How many people with early Alzheimer’s disease will get access to this drug when it is too late for the drug to help because the FDA delayed its release into the market?

Colleen Hroncich

Nikki Duslak says she never fit in as a public school teacher. “I have a background in theater—a bachelor’s degree in fine art and musical theater—and I always carried that love with me in the classroom. I was constantly doing crazy, off‐​the‐​wall things and other teachers would look at me like I had six heads,” she explains. “I had always had that passion to integrate art into my classroom, and I saw firsthand what it could do for students.”

She remembers sitting in the teachers’ room at lunch hearing people complain about the state of things. “If I was a school principal, I wouldn’t do things this way,” she thought. So, she went back to school and got her masters in educational leadership and policy studies. “I became a school principal, and I constantly found myself saying, ‘Gosh, this is awful. Someday I’m going to open my own school, and I’m going to do things differently.’”

But a “someday” dream doesn’t always become reality. “It was very challenging to even think about because there were so many loose ends. There is no handbook or guidebook; it’s different depending on what state you’re in. And it was just a very overwhelming thought,” Nikki says.

Eventually, it was her own child’s needs that gave Nikki the push she needed. Her son was reading at a third‐​grade level and solving Algebra problems at age three, so she knew it was going to be tough to find the right school for him. After trying a few options—including having him in classes with 13‐​year‐​olds when he was five—Nikki realized it was time to start a new kind of school. The result is CREATE Conservatory, which opened in Florida in 2020.

“People think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I found a book called Nonprofits for Dummies, and I sat down with the book and a bottle of wine. I thought, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it,’” she recalls. “I decided that the fear of what would happen if I tried to open the school was less than the fear of what was going to happen to him if I didn’t.”

Nikki’s public school career gave her a realization that the public system is about mass producing. “If you’re a mass production kind of student, then that might work great for you. If you’re the kind of student who can sit down and be quiet and listen—and you can show what you’ve learned through a very specific methodology—that system might work for you. But it doesn’t work for so many of our children,” she says.

What I was really trying to create was an environment where students were able to show what they know as opposed to being caught with what they don’t know. And an opportunity to teach children how to think; I believe so much of the modern education system has removed opportunities for children to think. We’re asking them to memorize information. We’re asking them to spit it back at us. But we’re not teaching them how to be critical thinkers. We’re not teaching them how to solve problems, especially how to solve problems creatively, which I believe is a massive part of your eventual success, whether it’s college or career or the workforce or military. Being able to look at a problem and solve it in a creative way is just something that doesn’t exist in the system right now. So for me that became, ‘How do I do that?’ I was immediately drawn back to all those times in a classroom where I saw arts integration be so wildly successful. And that was with students that you’d never think. I was teaching in a very rural, very low income school, and I was using arts integration.

Nikki and her team write the curriculum themselves. “I think part of why we don’t see arts integration as a more widespread methodology is because it is incredibly hard,” she says. “You have to have a really deep understanding of the arts. You have to have a very deep understanding of curriculum, curriculum writing, and scope and sequence. And you also have to have an incredible knowledge of your students who are in front of you. Because if you don’t have all three of those things, it’s not going to work.” Nikki uses Florida state standards as the basis and then finds ways to incorporate the arts into various topics.

“We don’t have textbooks here. We learn everything through videos or articles I find online,” Nikki says. “If we want to study the solar system, if we want to learn about space, why am I going to use a 10‐​year‐​old textbook when I can go to NASA’s website right now and we can talk about the comet they discovered this morning? We can pull it up on the screen and read the website right now. The kids feel like they’re cutting edge because they’re learning about it, and it just happened yesterday. And they’re excited about it.”

After the struggles of Nikki’s own gifted children trying to fit in a standard classroom, differentiation is a key aspect of CREATE. “The way that we differentiate here is either through content, product, or process,” she explains. She currently has 4th grade through 9th grade in one classroom, and she acknowledges that’s a challenge. She’ll do a group lesson on a subject and then break them into smaller groups to work on specific aspects at more individualized levels. This allows students to work on mastery at their ability level rather than an arbitrary metric based on their age.

Nikki has been approached about creating a curriculum that can be replicated in other schools, but she hasn’t figured out a way due to the creativity and personalization she incorporates throughout all of her classes. “I find that the curriculum piece is becoming that someday dream of mine. Someday when I have time, I’m going to sit down and flesh this out a bit because I do think it’s something that we need,” she says. Considering her last “someday” dream became a flourishing microschool that was a semifinalist for the Yass Prize, it’s probably safe to keep an eye out for her curriculum in the future.

When she first started planning CREATE, Nikki was a school choice skeptic because she saw the state as part of the problem when it came to public schools. But then she realized she would retain autonomy with Florida’s scholarship programs, so she now happily participates to ensure students in her rural, low‐​income area can attend CREATE Conservatory.

“As adults, it’s rare that we have the opportunity to sit back and reflect on a decision that we made and be able to say I’m very proud of myself. But I do with this because I really was very opposed to it at the beginning. Then the more I sat down and read, the more I looked into it, and the more I talked to people, I thought, ‘Well, I think I was wrong about this. And I think if the school’s going to survive, we have to go this route.’ And so every day I’m thankful I was smart enough to realize that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and to change my opinion about it all,” she says. “I couldn’t be more thankful for Step Up and for AAA and for all the things that they do because we wouldn’t exist at this point without them.”

Paul Matzko

By a unanimous vote, fifty members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a bill that would functionally ban TikTok unless it sells its US operations to a competitor. The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” — which, given its inelegant acronym of PAFFACAA, seems destined to be known simply as the TikTok ban bill — would prohibit Chinese companies or investors from having a 20 percent or larger ownership share of major social media platforms operating in the US. Should Bytedance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, fail to divest in a timely fashion, massive financial penalties would be imposed on any app store that carried TikTok.

The bill is speedrunning through Congress: a surprise introduction on Tuesday, a quick markup on Thursday, and the promise of a full House vote next week. It is a clever, well‐​organized move. Given that 170 million Americans use TikTok — or more than half the country — the specter of a ban on the popular app could rouse massive popular backlash if given time to develop. They’re correct to be concerned.

For example, last year after the House Energy and Commerce Committee interviewed TikTok CEO Shou Chew, I put together a spreadsheet of the top 300 TikTok videos using popular hashtags referring to the hearing. Those videos attracted more than half a billion views in a week. To put that in context, that’s more than four times the number of views for the last Super Bowl. (Though, of course, it’s likely that viewers who watched one video saw others as well.)

Both the framing of the videos and the millions of comments left by users were overwhelmingly negative; of the 300 videos, only a handful were not overtly critical of Congress. There was a recurrent pattern to many of the videos: TikTok users would profess their prior apathy towards politics, then express their disgust over their first peek into how the congressional sausage gets made, and finally promise to vote against any politician who backed a TikTok ban.

That ban could turn into a political nightmare for its supporters in an already contentious election season. Pollster Nate Silver notes that a narrow plurality of Americans back a TikTok ban (35 percent vs 31 percent), but Congress might end up learning the hard way that the anger of TikTok users over losing their favorite platform might be far more intense (and politically consequential) than the mild antipathy towards TikTok of non‐​users.

Beyond the pragmatic considerations, this bill — should it pass and should TikTok refuse to divest — would result in the largest removal of speech in US history, and by several orders of magnitude. Other notorious instances of government infringement affected far fewer people, from the two dozen writers sanctioned under the Alien and Sedition Acts to the several thousand readers who lost access to Communist newspapers because of postal service restrictions during the Second Red Scare. There is simply no precedent for the sheer quantity of speech involved.

Given the immense potential consequences, one would think that the bill’s authors would have proffered some hard evidence of Chinese government surveillance using American TikTok data. They have not. There are allegations that the Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to force Singapore‐​based TikTok to force its US team in Los Angeles to share user data under the terms of a 2017 Chinese national security law.

In fact, I don’t doubt that they could, assuming of course that they would be willing to risk exposure and the implosion of a $200 billion company just to gain information they could otherwise buy from data brokers for pennies. But maybe Chinese bureaucrats are as fond of making silly, unforced errors as their American counterparts are.

Still, there is no hard evidence that Chinese authorities have ever surveilled American data. (TikTok would credit its $1.5 billion “Project Texas,” a firewall for US data collection and storage overseen by Oracle.) Even ban supporters themselves talk about surveillance as a future risk, not a current practice. As Dan Crenshaw (R‑TX) put it, “China is at war with us. And they use TikTok as a weapon, or at least they can.” Crenshaw then launched into a series of increasingly scary “imagine if” scenarios, a tacit admission that this ban threat is proceeding on a speculative basis.

Setting Crenshaw’s hawkish, wartime rhetoric aside, forcing Chinese investors to sell their stake in TikTok’s most profitable global market could very well escalate another kind of war: the ongoing trade war between the US and China. Trade wars make everyone involved poorer, and the US is particularly vulnerable in this case given US dominance in the tech sector. After all, of the twenty largest global tech companies, more are based in the US than in the rest of the world combined.

Also, bear in mind that Edward Snowden and Wikileaks claimed that the NSA and CIA gained backdoor access to data gathered by US companies, including Facebook and Google, to spy on foreign heads of state and foreign journalists. If that is correct, then TikTok ban supporters are the pot calling the kettle black. But whether or not those allegations are true, many countries certainly believe them to be so. And if more countries start forcing foreign investors to divest from domestic operations out of fear of illicit surveillance, then US companies stand to lose far more in the resulting informational trade wars than do companies based in China.

What is strange to me is how quickly Congress has escalated its threats and on so thin an evidentiary basis. If TikTok is indeed routinely providing access to American user data to Chinese authorities, it is worth sanctioning. But there are a host of intermediate regulatory steps that lie somewhere in between doing nothing and threatening an outright ban. For example, Congress could mandate that regular third party reviews of data collection practices by TikTok be shared with a relevant executive agency. They could condition a forced sale on evidence of surveillance or other inappropriate behavior.

But they have not, and are instead now setting the stage for a gigantic game of divestment‐​or‐​ban chicken with a wildly popular platform used by half of Americans.

Crossposted from the author’s Substack newsletter. Click through and subscribe for more content on the intersection between history, policy, and media.

Chris Edwards

President Biden is expected in his State of the Union address to propose raising the federal corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. The administration says it wants to make “big corporations pay their fair share” and reverse the “massive tax giveaway to big corporations that Republicans enacted in 2017.”

A few thoughts.

Corporations pay income taxes, but the burden is passed on to workers, savers, and consumers. These individuals would pay the higher “share” that the administration is proposing. Corporations are just a politically convenient vehicle for collecting taxes on people.

In 2017, Republicans cut the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but they also broadened the corporate tax base in various ways. Also, corporations respond to tax rate cuts by investing more and avoiding and evading taxes less. Thus, the statutory rate cut was not a “massive tax giveaway.” Indeed, federal corporate tax revenues have soared since the GOP reform from $297 billion in 2017 to an expected $569 billion in 2024. The latter figure is inflated for temporary reasons, and revenues are expected to fall to $494 billion in 2025, but that is still up from 2017—not a giveaway.

One reason to retain a lower corporate tax rate is that America competes globally for job‐​creating investments. With average state taxes on top, the US corporate tax rate is 25.8 percent. That rate is already higher than the world average of 23.5 percent, according to the Tax Foundation, and the Biden proposal would further reduce our competitiveness.

Contrary to the administration, I think America should have the best tax environment in the world for entrepreneurs and business investment. The real “massive giveaways” are President Biden’s special handouts for politically favored industries such as energy, automobiles, and semiconductors. It’s better to have low and equal tax rates for all than subsidies for the few.

Read further Cato commentary on taxes from Adam Michel and Chris Edwards.

Colin Grabow and Scott Lincicome

In last week’s Wall Street Journal, we called for reforming protectionist laws to improve the flailing US maritime industry. In particular, we proposed that the federal government allow American firms to purchase oceangoing ships from allied shipyards for use in domestic commerce—something currently prohibited by the 1920 Jones Act—and scrap a 50 percent duty on commercial vessel repairs performed overseas. These reforms, we argued, would help to “generate an influx of new ships, boost US mariner employment, motivate US shipbuilders to innovate, and increase US supply‐​chain efficiency.”

Given the Journal’s national exposure, we weren’t surprised to see it elicit a response from allies of the special interests profiting from the protectionist status quo. Slightly more surprising, however, is the utter vacuity of their arguments.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published two letters to the editor that took issue with our op‐​ed, including one from the Senate Armed Services Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Roger Wicker (R‑MI). Senator Wicker—the recipient of a 2012 award from maritime lobbyists—insisted that American maritime protectionism has persisted for “hundreds of years” for “a simple reason: it works.” He adds that the Jones Act specifically “helps stabilize the nation’s maritime industry” and “facilitates some 650,000 jobs across our vast system of shipyards, ports and waterways and adds $150 billion annually to our economy.”

Leaving aside for the moment that the senator repeatedly mischaracterized our proposal as Jones Act “repeal” instead of reform, his evidence of the law’s benefits is sorely lacking. Let’s take each assertion one by one.

A “Stabilized” US Maritime Industry?

By any reasonable metric—such as the number of ships being built, mariners employed, or the size of the oceangoing fleet—the nation’s maritime industry cannot possibly be considered “stabilized.” Annual deliveries of oceangoing merchant ships are in the low single digits (including zero this year and next).

The fleet is both aging and has more than halved in number since 1980. And there aren’t enough mariners to meet the needs of a sustained sealift operation—no surprise given the decline in ships. Senator Wicker himself admits in his letter that the United States currently ranks 70th in commercial shipping inventory.

As we noted in our op‐​ed, these and other depressing statistics have pushed a bipartisan chorus of senators and representatives to openly worry about the threat the decrepit US maritime sector poses to US national security. If the Jones Act has truly “stabilized” the maritime industry, it’s only because US shipping and shipbuilding have hit rock bottom.

650,000 Jobs?

The senator’s jobs claims are similarly dubious. As previously detailed, the topline figure of 650,000 American jobs is an outdated, lobbyist‐​generated fiction. (The word “facilitates” gives away the game here—our two families’ grocery shopping, for example, arguably “facilitates” millions of supermarket jobs, but we’d never be so brazen as to take full credit for them.) Instead, industry and government figures put the actual total of American shipping and shipbuilding jobs directly supported by the Jones Act at around 100,000—certainly not nothing but statistically insignificant in a 158‐​million‐​person US labor market that creates and destroys millions of jobs each month.

More importantly, US maritime law is not a make‐​work jobs program. It’s supposed to ensure vibrant American shipping and shipbuilding industries, and as already noted, it’s utterly failing in this regard. Moreover, as we explain in our op‐​ed, allowing American shipping companies to purchase better, less expensive vessels and reducing their repair and maintenance costs would result in an expanded and modernized US commercial fleet, more commercial shipping (thanks to lower prices), and therefore more, not fewer, US seafarer jobs. An enlarged fleet would also generate more repair and maintenance opportunities for US shipyards (when they aren’t building ships for the US government, by far their leading source of revenue). Any talk of lost jobs, meanwhile, must grapple with the fact that shipyard closures and job losses—the result of ship deliveries barely above zero—is exactly what has transpired with the Jones Act in place. You can’t lose what doesn’t exist.

$150 Billion Added to the Economy?

Like the mythical 650,000 jobs “facilitated” by the Jones Act, notions that the law adds $150 billion annually to the US economy are unmoored from reality. The industry‐​funded report behind this number shows that it refers not to net economic output directly attributable to the Jones Act and US maritime protectionism but rather to gross economic output resulting from alleged indirect and induced effects (whatever those may be). As the underlying report itself admits, the domestic maritime industry’s direct value-added—its contribution to US GDP—is a far smaller $17.5 billion. That’s more in line with government data showing a $15.4 billion contribution to GDP from marine freight transport and another $512 million from the construction of commercial ships, barges, and tugboats/​towboats.

More importantly, by raising the cost of domestic transport, the Jones Act—as numerous studies have found—inflicts a range of harms and generates a net loss for the US economy overall. It is a de facto tax on domestic commerce and a barrier to Americans’ ability to trade with one another. The law weakens domestic supply chains, boosts local rail and road congestion, degrades the environment, and strains relations with US trading partners. Small wonder the Organisation for Economic Co‐​operation and Development found that repealing the Jones Act would increase the US GDP by between $19 billion and $64 billion.

The economic damage inflicted by the Jones Act is supposed to be the implicit price we all pay for a strong American maritime industry that can meet US national security needs. But it has utterly failed in this regard.

Both the ship repair tariff—first imposed in 1922 but with antecedents dating back to 1866—as well as the Jones Act, whose origins can be traced to at least the early 1800s, are profoundly out of step with modern maritime realities. Until this is acknowledged and addressed, the US maritime industry will remain in its current enfeebled state, with accompanying costs to both the economy and national security.

And no amount of congressional handwaving can change that fact.

Chris Edwards

In his State of the Union address, President Biden is expected to discuss raising taxes on the rich. As he often does, Biden may claim that the rich pay lower tax rates than firefighters or school teachers or that the rich pay a tax rate of just 8 percent.

A Reuters story on the State of the Union address parrots the White House theme without any independent fact‐​checking: “The average American worker paid about a 25% tax rate in 2022, the OECD reported. White House research found the wealthiest individuals paid about 8% from 2010 to 2018.”

White House “research”? The 8 percent is a concoction by Biden political appointees at odds with data from the US Treasury, Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Internal Revenue Service, and Joint Committee on Taxation. All these official sources find that tax rates on high earners are much higher than tax rates on lower‐ and middle‐​income folks. Let’s look at the Treasury and CBO data.

The first chart shows Treasury estimates for 2024 by income decile and the top 1 percent. The tax rates are all federal taxes (income, payroll, excise, and other) divided by family income. The top 1 percent will pay an average rate of 31.5 percent this year, compared with 10–12 percent in the middle and about 0 percent at the bottom. The rates near the bottom can be negative because of refundable tax credits.

The second chart shows Congressional Budget Office estimates for the low‑, middle‑, and high‐​income quintiles and the top 1 percent. The tax rates are federal income, payroll, and excise taxes divided by household income.

The average tax rate on the top 1 percent has hovered around 30 percent for four decades.

Average tax rates on the low‐ and middle‐​income quintiles have trended downward. Households in the low quintile pay no net federal taxes, while households in the middle quintile paid about 13 percent in recent years prior to 2020. Tax rates plunged in 2020 due to “recovery rebate credits” handed out that year, which were refundable tax credits.

In sum, Treasury and CBO data show that federal tax rates at the bottom average about 0 percent or less, tax rates in the middle average less than 15 percent, and rates at the top average around 30 percent. Average tax rates at the top are twice the tax rates in the middle.

False claims about tax rates on high earners are remarkably persistent given the easy availability of the official data. For further reading on tax rates by income level, see the following blog posts: “Biden Bulldozes Billionaires with New Tax,” “Tax Rates on the Rich,” “Tax Rates by Income Level,” and “Tax Rates by Income Level.”

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett

Over the past 30 years, we estimate that emergency spending has generated almost $2 trillion in interest costs. Congress should reject the allure of costly, short‐​term budget thinking and offset new emergency spending.

Tonight, President Biden will address the nation in his State of the Union address, outlining his political priorities during this election year. One of the topics he’ll likely discuss is foreign aid for Ukraine—a hot‐​button issue for voters and a major sticking point in the latest round of budget negotiations. Some have framed the multibillion‐​dollar package as a temporary and relatively low‐​cost investment.

Regarding emergency spending, as we pointed out last week, “one‐​time” or “low‐​cost” framing misses the bigger point. Even within a short 10‐​year budget window, a $95 billion foreign aid package adds $41 billion in additional interest costs. Decades of myopic budgeting have driven deficits and debt to record highs. The United States cannot afford to casually deficit‐​spend anymore. Regardless of the foreign policy rationale for additional aid, offsetting new spending is the only fiscally responsible path forward.

The Present‐​Day Cost of Repeated Emergency Spending

Prior emergency spending was almost entirely financed through deficit spending and incurred interest costs that have increased the debt burden. Using our emergency spending data set, we can generate a rough approximation of the interest costs generated from prior emergencies. For this calculation, we assume that all emergency spending added to the deficit and resulted in interest costs paid under a weighted average annual interest rate for all marketable Treasury securities of the relevant year.

In real dollars, the $12 trillion in emergency spending over the past 30 years generated almost $2 trillion of total interest costs to date. And that’s before considering future emergency spending that’s already on the books, including the more than $100 billion Congress plans on spending over the next few years under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or any potential emergency spending Congress tends to pass every year, such as disaster relief. The graph below shows historical emergency spending and associated interest costs.

Two trillion dollars is a massive cost to incur for “temporary” emergency spending. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount Congress has spent through the Department of Energy and the Department of State combined over the past three decades. If Congress incorporated interest costs into legislative cost estimates, perhaps legislators would be less prone to spending so recklessly. As it stands, current and future taxpayers will continue to shoulder the burden of past fiscal decisions.

The United States’ fiscal position is deteriorating. This year, net interest costs are expected to reach $870 billion, exceeding the annual defense budget. By 2028, public debt will surpass the World War II record high of 106 percent of GDP. Debt continues to climb rapidly and unsustainably thereafter. Excessive public debt slows economic growth and reduces Americans’ incomes by crowding out private investment and increasing interest rates. Appropriators would be wise to avoid abusing emergency spending and start taking fiscal tradeoff considerations seriously.

Drawing a Line in the Sand

Legislators today can benefit from hindsight. The extravagant pandemic spending spree is in the rearview mirror. Over 30 years, $12 trillion in emergency spending has boosted debt levels to new heights and has already generated roughly $2 trillion in additional interest costs. The long‐​term fiscal costs of myopic emergency budgeting demonstrate why legislators should offset new emergency spending today, either immediately or in the near future.

Offsetting new spending is a common‐​sense, realistic ask. If Biden’s foreign policy priorities really deserve new funding, Congress can scrounge up the funds from elsewhere. Some deficit‐​reducing proposals include reducing subsidies to states and localities, cutting wasteful agriculture spending, or reviewing expired authorizations for potential savings. Without offsets, emergency spending will further worsen the already dire fiscal outlook. It’s time Congress and the executive branch start budgeting responsibly.

Check out our summary highlights on The Debt Dispatch of our policy paper “Curbing Federal Emergency Spending: Government Spending Grows with Excessive and Wasteful Emergency Designations.”

Angelo A. Paparelli and David J. Bier

With spring approaching, US businesses that sponsor noncitizen workers for employment‐​based immigration benefits are accustomed to weathering seasonal changes. Most employers are likely ready for the initial FY 2025 H‑1B lottery registration season. But beyond the usual H‑1B registration pressures, these are the “[immigration] times that try [employer’s] souls.”

American businesses now face particularly inclement headwinds stirred up by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) component tasked with deciding immigration‐​benefits requests. Here are the latest USCIS tempests:

Increased Premium Processing Fees

Effective February 26, 2024, the agency (with congressional authorization) imposed higher, inflation‐​adjusted premium processing fees that must be filed to expedite an application. For example, premium processing of:

Form I‑129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker, jumps from $2,500 to $2,805 for most temporary work visa categories, and
Form I‑539, Application to Extend/​Change Nonimmigrant Status, rises from $1,750 to $1,965 for students, exchange visitors, and dependents of noncitizens in work‐​visa status, and
Form I‑765, Application for Employment Authorization, scales from $1,500 to $1,685 for students requesting pre‐​and post‐​completion optional practical training (OPT) or a 24‐​month STEM OPT extension.

Increased Standard Filing Fees

Effective April 1, 2024, a USCIS final rule increases standard filing fees on employment‐​based nonimmigrant petitions (I‑129s) and immigrant petitions (I‑140s). The increase in fees for two of the most heavily used nonimmigrant work visa categories is substantial: H‑1B petitions (+70 percent, from $460 to $780) and L‑1 petitions (+201 percent, from $460 to $1,385, except for small employers and nonprofits). Although filing fees for immigrant petitions increase only 2 percent (to $715), Form I‑485 green card applications to adjust status to legal permanent residence jump 26 percent (from $1,140 to $1,440 for persons 14 and older, if not requiring biometric screening).

Added to the base fees for I‑129s and I‑140s is a $600 “Asylum Program Fee” (except that businesses with twenty‐​five or fewer employees must pay only a $300 surcharge, and nonprofits need not pay this added fee). The final rule is effective on April 1, just in time for H‑1B petitions submitted on behalf of beneficiaries selected in the FY 2025 lottery. For next year’s H‑1B registrations (opening in March 2025), the fee will jump from $10 to $215—an increase of 2,050 percent.

New Mandatory (Not Ready for Prime Time) Forms

Likewise effective on April 1, 2024, USCIS requires that new versions of Forms I‑129 and I‑140 (nonimmigrant and immigrant employment‐​based petitions) to reflect the higher filing fees be submitted. Although the agency, as of March 6, has not released published versions of the final forms (but only previews), it cautions that there “will be no grace period” if earlier versions are used instead.

New Online “Organizational Accounts”

USCIS also announced the launch on February 28, 2024 of H‑1B “organizational accounts,” which in theory will permit an employer, only one attorney in a law firm, and only that lawyer’s designated paralegals to collaborate in the H‑1B online lottery registration process. Although this new online platform promises to be an improvement over the current paper‐​filing process, it will require several rounds of technical updates before it can be widely used, or expanded to other work visa categories.

As now configured, aside from the limits on participation by multi‐​attorney law firms and paralegals assigned to more than one lawyer, the online system requires extensive manual data entry and editing of required information. It has no option for API integration with existing commercial immigration case‐​management software solutions. These constraints will limit its potential for use by employers, attorneys, and their shared paralegals, who must submit registrations for multiple beneficiaries and later submit H‑1B petitions for cases selected in the lottery.

Continuing USCIS Illegal and Intrusive “Site Visits”

In its final fee rule, USCIS rejected public comments, including those of the Cato Institute, which challenged a $91.4 million (73.6 percent) payroll increase allocated to the USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) since 2016 to conduct investigations (euphemistically described as “site visits”) at employer businesses and worker residences. In doing so, the agency claimed that “FDNS’s work does not fall into ‘intelligence’ and/​or ‘investigations’ work that the [Immigration and Nationality Act] assigned to [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)],” and that, in any event, the issuance by the Secretary of DHS of Homeland Security Delegation No. 0150.1 expressly authorized USCIS to “investigate alleged civil and criminal violations of the immigration laws.” Apparently, USCIS thinks that when it “investigates,” it is not an “investigation.”

USCIS’s response to public comments omitted any discussion of relevant provisions of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA), which limited the actions of USCIS to engaging solely in the “adjudication” of petitions and applications seeking immigration benefits and naturalization (6 U.S.C. § 271(b)), and exclusively tasked another bureau, now comprised of ICE and US Customs and Border Protection, with the powers of immigration‐​related investigations and intelligence gathering (6 U.S.C. § 251(3) and 6 U.S.C. § 251(4)).

Most importantly, the HSA prohibited the DHS secretary from recombining the two bureaus into a single agency or otherwise combining, joining, or consolidating functions or organizational units of the two bureaus with each other (6 U.S.C. § 291(b)).

USCIS is impermissibly using user fees meant for adjudications to conduct investigations that ICE could be doing using congressional appropriations. It will therefore likely require litigation to demonstrate that the USCIS/FDNS program of site visits is unlawful because Homeland Security Delegation No. 0150.1 was issued in violation of 6 U.S.C. § 291(b).

* * *

Despite the recent USCIS changes and the agency’s starkly increased fees, there is little reason for employers and their sponsored noncitizen workers to expect that USCIS’s service levels will soon improve, or that immigration backlogs will decline significantly. USCIS rejected Cato’s comments that the agency should tie any fee increases to shorter processing times, meaning that the agency is about to get substantially more money with virtually no accountability.

In responding to public comments on the fee rule, and in its other public actions, USCIS has apparently not heeded concerns that its adjudicators are taking substantially more time to decide cases, and issuing more requests for additional evidence; its petitions and applications have grown in page length (thus taking longer to decide); and its officers often ask for evidence possessed by third parties that have no voice or standing in a pending matter. Worse still, by continuing the FDNS/USCIS investigative site visit program even though it is unlawful under the HSA, and by opting for an asylum surcharge on employers’ petitions through an “ability‐​to‐​pay principle for determining user fees,” USCIS may well trigger a repeat of litigation challenging and enjoining the new filing fees, which will only prolong and exacerbate delays and backlogs.

From the perspective of American employers sponsoring noncitizens for immigration benefits, the weather in US immigration is very unseasonable.

Angelo Paparelli, a Partner in Vialto Law (US) PLLC, has received the highest peer rankings in immigration law over several years from Chambers USA, Chambers Global, Legal500, and Best Lawyers in America. An elected Fellow in the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, he is a prolific blogger and policy advocate on the US immigration system, offering constructive solutions to help maintain and enhance America’s economic prosperity, political freedoms, and heritage as a nation of immigrants. This article reflects only the views of its authors.

Alex Nowrasteh

Last week, I published updated research on illegal immigrant homicide rates in Texas, settling a disagreement with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). As a brief recap, I discovered unique crime data from Texas that showed illegal immigrants have lower criminal conviction and arrest rates than native‐​born Americans and that legal immigrants had the lowest of all.

CIS claimed that I undercounted illegal immigrant criminals because I didn’t request the right kind of data from Texas. I spent 16 months writing numerous FOIAs (PIRs in Texan parlance) to guarantee that there was no undercounting or double counting of illegal immigrant criminals.

Turns out that I was correct all along, and CIS was wrong. CIS overstates the illegal immigrant homicide rate by relying on data that double‐​counted some illegal immigrant murderers.

CIS is now claiming that I made a “brazenly false claim about [their] illegal immigrant crime research.” Below are some claims made by CIS, followed by my responses.

There was no double‐​counting in the data we received from DPS. DPS sent us an “illegal” column, which counts illegals identified at arrest, and a separate “prison” column, which counts illegals identified in prison. As Chrystal Davila at DPS explained to us in an email on October 19, 2022, those columns do not overlap: ‘Data request results that include an illegal column and a prison column will not count the same person twice. If they are in the illegal column, they have been identified by DHS through PEP, and possibly in prison. If they are in the prison column, they have only been identified while in prison with TDCJ. [Emphasis added.]’

CIS claims they are correct because they have a poorly worded email from Texas sent to them days after they published their original research. They should have asked about their data quality before publishing their data. Actually, they did ask whether the data could be separated in June 2022, and this was how Texas responded to CIS when they asked:

We are unable to break down the data as you described specifically in your example. We can supply the number uniquely identified by TDCJ (Prison category) and the total number of Illegals identified through PEP (this can include illegals also identified by TDCJ). Please note, if someone was uniquely identified through TDCJ, but at a later time is identified through PEP, the individual would no longer be in the Prison category and would reflect the PEP identification [emphasis added].

CIS used the dataset that Texas warned could include some double counting. That warning is why I made specific FOIA requests to avoid double counting or undercounting: Illegal immigrant criminals only identified through PEP, only identified by TDCJ, and those only identified by both. Additionally, I also asked Texas for a codebook and metadata that clearly define the variables. CIS did not. Figure 1 is what Texas sent me.

Figure 1

Variable Definitions for Cato’s Crime Data

Figure 2 is my data request. In the future, CIS should ask more specific questions.

Figure 2

Cato’s Data Request

“Leave aside all those abbreviations (explained in our original report) and focus on the emphasized text, which unambiguously refutes Nowrasteh. We do marvel at the brazenness of his claim, though. Surely he knew it could be tested by simply asking DPS, as we already did in the email quoted above.”

CIS is confused. I did ask for variable definitions, which are included in Figure 1. Those definitions were sent to me along with the data I requested. They are different from CIS’s results because the data CIS received is partly double‐​counted, just as Texas warned them in a June 2022 email. Importantly, I asked for the variable definitions before publishing my research, whereas CIS did so after they published.

CIS jumped the gun, and it’s a good lesson for junior researchers. The main purpose of having variable definitions is so researchers don’t have to rely on poorly worded emails sent after the research was published. Better to get the variable definitions directly from the people who pulled the data from their database.

Remarkably, CIS never asked me for my data. I messaged Sean Kennedy, a co‐​author of the CIS report, on February 1 to discuss the new Texas data I had received. We emailed back and forth several times. He never asked for my data. Jason Richwine, the other author of the CIS report and the blog post I’m responding to, never asked for my data. Perhaps they’ll just FOIA it directly from Texas.

When other groups present interesting findings with unique data, I always ask for the data if I’m going to write about their findings and it’s otherwise unavailable. My data are available for all who want it, they just need to ask. Those who think they already know the answer will not ask.

Eric Gomez and Benjamin Giltner

The backlog of US weapons sales owed to Taiwan did not change much in February 2024. The Biden administration only announced one new sale—upgrade equipment for a battlefield communication system valued at $75 million—and there were no weapons deliveries reported. This new sale places the overall size of the Taiwan arms backlog at approximately $19.1 billion. See Figure 1 for a breakdown of the backlog by weapon category, Figure 2 for a side‐​by‐​side comparison of the backlog from January to February, and Table 1 for a detailed list of backlogged capabilities.

However, two news items from February 2024 warrant discussion, each highlighting Taiwan’s egregiously long weapon delivery timelines.

Guided Bombs

On February 2, the Department of Defense announced a contract award to Raytheon to produce 50 AGM-154C Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs) for Taiwan. The JSOW is an unpowered, guided bomb that uses onboard wings to glide to its target from long distance after an aircraft releases it.

The contract fulfills an arms sale that the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) announced in June 2017, creating a nearly seven‐​year gap between announcement of the sale and contract award. The contract announcement also specifies that delivery of the weapons is expected in March 2028. This means that Taiwan will wait almost 11 years between the arms sale announcement and delivery for 50 JSOWs.

For comparison, the DSCA announced a sale of 200 JSOWs to Qatar as part of a November 2016 sale of F‑15 aircraft and munitions, only seven months prior to Taiwan’s sale. The contract award took place on October 4, 2017, and Qatar received their JSOWs in June 2020. For Qatar, it took less than a year to go from sale announcement to contract award, and less than four years between the arms sale announcement and delivery for the 200 JSOWs.

In other words, it took an authoritarian state in a region infamous for drawing the United States into strategically damaging quagmires less than four years to receive 200 JSOWs, while a country facing down Washington’s “pacing threat” will wait 11 years for only 50 units of the same weapon. Unfortunately, the JSOW case is but a small example of a bigger problem; the United States is unable to strategically prioritize and make the best use of finite military resources.

If Congress is serious about speeding up arms deliveries to Taiwan, it should seriously investigate the causes behind the 11‐​year gap between JSOW sale‐​announcement and delivery.

F‑16 Upgrade

The second item to note for February is the US Air Force’s announcement that it completed a $4.5 billion modernization of Taiwan’s F‑16 aircraft fleet. Taiwan is also acquiring newly built F‑16s under a 2019 arms sale, which is scheduled for completion in 2026. The upgrade program, also known as “Peace Phoenix Rising,” improves Taiwan’s older F‑16s with new engines, radars, and a host of other subsystems.

The DSCA announced the upgrade program in September 2011. However, it took Taiwan seven years from the announcement to receive its first upgraded aircraft (late 2018) and twelve years to receive the final upgraded aircraft (December 2023). We did not include the Peace Phoenix Rising program in the arms backlog dataset because, unlike newly built weapons, Taiwan could use some F‑16s even though other aircraft were out of service to have new equipment installed.

Despite the completion of Peace Phoenix Rising and its lack of impact on the Taiwan backlog dataset, the program’s twelve‐​year timeline is nothing to celebrate. Indeed, several members of Congress recently voiced their concerns about delays in the upgrade program and the potential for delays in delivery of the newly built F‑16s that Taiwan has yet to receive.

Several other countries are embarking on similar F‑16 upgrade programs, However, data on their progress is difficult to find. Greece received its first upgraded F‑16 in September 2022, five years after DSCA announced the program, and is scheduled to receive the last of its 84 improved aircraft in 2027. For both first and final delivery, Greece will be two years faster than Taiwan, but its program covers fewer aircraft. DSCA announced an upgrade program for 23 Moroccan F‑16s in 2019, but we could not locate an estimated first or final delivery for those aircraft.

Conclusion

The decade‐​plus gap between arms sale announcement and completed delivery for Taiwan’s JSOWs and upgraded F‑16s are particularly glaring examples of the long waits that Taiwan faces for receiving arms sales from the United States. We have previously shown that Taiwan waits longer on average for HIMARS, newly built F‑16s, and Abrams tanks than other recipients.

Correcting these delays and getting weapons into Taiwan’s hands, especially asymmetric capabilities, is essential for improving deterrence and keeping the United States out of a potentially devastating war with China.

Taiwan Arms Backlog Dataset, February 2024