A few days ago, the invaluable Liz Oyer noted a change in the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) rules. That agency runs our federal prisons, directing the lives of over 150,000 federal prisoners. It is a change in the rules that seems innocuous until you start thinking about it. Briefly, the old rule was that the BOP decides which prison each inmate goes to; the new rule is that the nation’s attorney general can override the BOP’s decision.

Here is the way things used to be: The BOP conducts a detailed, bureaucratized, quantitative assessment of each inmate’s “security designation and custody classification.” Each inmate is assigned a score based on factors such as offense severity, criminal history, sentence length, and age. That score is used to determine where the inmate serves time. 

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Last Tuesday (July 28), the Senate confirmed Jay Clayton to be the new director of national intelligence (DNI). Yet Clayton was not sworn in until today, with William Pulte continuing to purportedly serve as the acting director of national intelligence for all of last week. Bizarrely, both men attended the cabinet meeting on Friday at Camp David. But while the administration was within its rights to delay Clayton’s swearing in as long as it wished, it could not extend Pulte’s acting service. Under the plain language of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, Pulte’s time limit as acting DNI expired the moment the Senate confirmed Clayton. Everything Pulte has done as acting DNI since that moment has been legally illegitimate and is vulnerable to a court challenge.

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On his first day in office for his second term as president, Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders and proclamations. One proclamation declared a “national emergency” on the US-Mexico border. In that proclamation, Trump directed the Defense Department to “support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security in obtaining complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.” He also directed that within 90 days of the proclamation (April 20, 2025), the Defense and Homeland Security departments were to “submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.”

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Number 28 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy:

• “When more than a third of the [House] seats see no competition at all, polarization and gerrymandering can explain some of the problem, but not all,” said [Olson]. And none of the other likely explanations “are exactly good signs for democracy.” [Eric Boehm, Reason] 
• Did the Chinese collection of American voting data constitute a huge security breach? States say federal authorities never notified them about it [Washington Post via ELB] Hard to discern any new resultant chill on relations with China [Phelim Kine, Politico] or with Russia, for that matter [Alan Feuer and Dustin Volz, New York Times] 
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Perhaps one of the most puzzling developments in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s multiple tariff salvos has been the lack of retaliation by the governments of affected countries. Most US trading partners have (so far) refused to impose duties on American exports, and many have even negotiated “reciprocal” trade agreements with the administration. Yet, as my colleague Scott Lincicome explained in a column for The Dispatch last year, amid this lack of tit-for-tat response by foreign governments, private individuals abroad are pushing back against Trump’s trade policies by limiting their consumption of American goods and services—most notably, tourism in the United States. 

While survey and government data already pointed to declines in foreign visits to the United States (see figures 1 and 2), a recent working paper finds that the “Liberation Day” tariff announcements in April 2025 led to a significant decline in tourism to the United States, costing the sector over $1 billion in lost revenue per month.

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A new Wall Street Journal investigation reports that companies are comparing notes about the extra cost of doing business in Washington these days. Its most revealing section concerns companies with business before the federal government.

Several CEOs and board members told the Journal they believe their contributions and access to Trump are linked. When a company’s problem reaches him, the president reportedly wants to know how much it has given. Many companies being solicited are seeking federal contracts or lobbying on trade, defense, regulation, and appropriations.

The Journal’s analysis puts the amount raised through Trump-linked political committees and projects at more than $800 million. 

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