Yesterday, the Commerce Department announced equity stakes in four more private companies. That brings the total to 40 announced or completed ownership deals by the Trump administration, which can be viewed in the Government Ownership Dashboard on Cato’s new Restoring Free Enterprise site. 

In a recent essay, I warned that Democratic investigations into the administration’s deals could lead Congress to turn Trump’s improvised portfolio into a permanent, formal ownership operation. Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports that Democrats indeed have “shopping plans, too” now that Trump has turned the federal government into a corporate owner. According to Mueller, former Biden administration officials suggested that a future Democratic president could build on “the precedent Trump has set” by “pressuring gun and oil companies.” 

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The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—the president’s in-house think tank—released a report this month that purported to find that the average illegal immigrant imposes a lifetime cost on taxpayers of $166,716—or up to $1.9 trillion in total—and that “amnesty” would add to these costs, while deportation spending would cut the deficit.

These estimates are not credible. As I show in a recent Cato paper, illegal immigrants are net taxpayers, meaning that they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Deporting them not only adds to the debt directly through spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also indirectly through reduced tax revenue. Illegal immigrants as a group have actually reduced federal, state, and local deficits by roughly $1.7 trillion over the last three decades.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that recent illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who entered from 2021 to 2026 will reduce deficits by about $900 billion from 2024 to 2034. Earlier this year, it found that immigration policy changes from 2025 alone increased the budget deficit by $500 billion from 2026 to 2035.

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In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.

Dr. Lisa Swinson spent years helping schools across North Carolina and beyond. She began her career as a first-grade teacher, became a school leader, worked in the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Charter Schools, and eventually launched an education consulting business that supported schools nationwide. But conversations with neighbors and relatives convinced her that she needed to focus on what was closer to home. 

“I was kind of like, ‘Oh, Lisa, wait a minute. How can you say you’re doing all these great things and you’re not even helping your neighbors?’” she recalls. 

Families in the Zebulon and Wendell area of North Carolina were frustrated by limited educational options. Lisa decided to do something about it, opening Creative Minds Microschool in fall 2024 with seven students in grades three through six.

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Dana Goldman is a top-notch health economist and the founding director of the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service. On October 22, he published a courageous and eye-opening mea culpa that everyone should read:

In November 2009, I joined 10 other economists in a letter urging Congress to pass a bill that became the Affordable Care Act. I could hardly imagine what would come next.

The ACA promised to expand coverage, and it did. But I signed the letter primarily because the ACA promised to “bend the cost curve” of American health care, which was getting out of control.…

The curve did not bend, and I now wish I hadn’t signed my name to that letter.

Why did Obamacare fail to contain costs?

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The terms “Old Right” and “New Right” are commonly used today, but it’s useful to know that they have a long pedigree. 

The Old Right of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, led by Robert Taft politically and people like Frank Chodorov intellectually, generally favored free markets at home and free trade abroad and placed a high value on individual liberty. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of figures emerged, calling themselves members of the New Right. Their goal was to push the Republican Party in a more nationalist, protectionist, and socially conservative direction. Many of today’s national conservatives, or NatCons, have happily assumed the moniker New Right to distinguish themselves from those conservatives who continue to support aspects of the Old Right credo and favor important parts of their predecessors’ project. Though these two New Rights are not identical, they share many beliefs, especially the use of government power to advance their agenda, which threatens economic freedom and individual liberty. 

Libertarian Roy A. Childs, Jr., warned about those ideas in his essay, “The New Authoritarians,” published in Inquiry magazine in 1982. That article, a review of three books on the New Right, is included in the 2026 edition of Liberty against Power, a collection of Childs’ essays published by Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, a project of the Cato Institute.

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Today the Cato Institute released the “Freedom in the 50 States” report for 2026. 

This revamped index consists of 97 policy measures over 10 categories sorted into either economic freedom or personal freedom. It assigns scores and letter grades to US states based on this general combined level of freedom. And, for the first time in the report’s history, this edition also scores and grades governors on how well or poorly they have advanced both economic and personal liberty in their states.

You can see the results here. And you can take a deep dive into the scores using the Data Dashboard and interactive maps. There’s plenty to see and analyze for yourself.

The project was over a year in the making. And when you spend that much time on a project, you usually accumulate plenty of insights. So you’ll be seeing more analysis from me based on the data in the index for Cato’s blog, in future policy reports, and elsewhere.