In 1995, when petitioner Holsey Ellingburg, Jr., robbed a bank, federal criminal restitution was governed by the Victim and Witness Protection Act (VWPA). The VWPA provided that a defendant’s liability to pay restitution ended twenty years after the entry of judgment. Then, in 1996, Congress enacted the Mandatory Victim Restitution Act (MVRA), which extended the liability period to twenty years after a defendant’s release from imprisonment and required that restitution include interest. The MVRA’s drafters apparently anticipated the possibility that its retroactive application might violate the Constitution’s Ex Post Facto Clause: Congress explicitly made the Act retroactive only “to the extent constitutionally permissible.”

Over the past several years, different jurisdictions in the US, Canada, and Europe have allowed people who use illicit drugs to access harm reduction equipment through vending machines.

In 1987, Denmark became the first country to permit harm reduction organizations to operate vending machines. Since then, harm reduction vending machines have spread across Europe, including in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, as well as in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Germany, with about 160 vending machines, leads the world in the number of machines dispensing syringes and other paraphernalia.

Many vending machines in Canada provide clean pipes, condoms, and HIV testing kits along with naloxone. In 2020, the British Columbian government authorized vending machines, called MySafe, to dispense a “safe supply” of legal drugs, such as hydromorphone (Dilaudid), to people who use illicit drugs, aiming to reduce the risks of uncertain dosages and unreliable black-market products. Writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers at the University of Waterloo described the program:

Medications for MySafe participants are dispensed at a local pharmacy, and the prescribed doses (as packaged, daily doses of tablets) are manually inserted into the machine. The machine (scans a participant’s handprint and then dispenses their daily prescription (e.g., 1 package of 16 hydromorphone tablets). Participants are expected to take their medications daily. Participants undergo a medical evaluation before enrolment and agree to regular follow-ups (at 1, 6 and 12 months) with a health professional to monitor health outcomes and conduct urine drug screens at the discretion of MySafe staff (e.g., with dose increases, to assess medication use). The initial dose is determined by the prescribing physician, along with participants, and titrated to a suitable dose based on an individual’s need. Dose adjustments normally occur during the first month of enrolment; however, dosing changes can be requested at any point.

In February of this year, the British Columbia health minister changed the program to require participants to use safer drugs under clinic supervision instead of taking them home, after reports indicated that many patients were selling these drugs on the street. One could argue that their customers were indirectly benefiting from the safe supply project, albeit secondhand.

While Canada has gone further with “safe supply” dispensing, many US jurisdictions have embraced vending machines for distributing harm reduction tools like naloxone and fentanyl test strips. For example, lawmakers in Clark County, NV, allowed harm reduction organizations to set up and operate vending machines in 2013. Trac‑B, a harm reduction group, started stocking vending machines with the overdose antidote naloxone and clean syringes in 2017. Some vending machines, such as one at the Milwaukee Veterans Affairs hospital cafeteria, offer fentanyl test strips and naloxone but do not provide clean syringes, pipes, or HIV testing kits.

While equipment vending machines differ by jurisdiction, they all operate based on the harm reduction principle of non-judgmentalism, offering anonymity to individuals and helping them avoid stigma, thereby removing barriers to access.

Last month, researchers from Penn State University published a systematic review on the effectiveness of vending machines as a harm reduction strategy in the Harm Reduction Journal. Using the Cochrane, Embase, MEDLINE, and PubMed databases, they examined thirty years of research literature, from the start of vending machines through November 2023. Studies consistently show strong demand for vending machines in various settings such as universities, medical centers, correctional facilities, and commercial sex workplaces. Users value the convenience, increased privacy, and the ability to access supplies at any time. Not only do people who use drugs utilize the vending machines, but they are also generally well-accepted by the surrounding communities. 

Two studies in the US found that county-level fatal overdose rates decreased because of naloxone-dispensing vending machines. Several studies found needle-sharing decreased, and some studies suggest the vending machines have led to earlier diagnoses of HIV.

The authors concluded:

Over the past three decades, harm reduction-focused VMs have been used in a variety of settings to offer needed harm reduction items and services, ranging from syringes to HIV self-tests to condoms. There are many potential intrinsic advantages to using VMs as a low-barrier method to reach high-risk, hard-to-reach individuals, reduce the harms associated with SUD and address co-occurring conditions. This systematic review indicates high feasibility and acceptability of these VMs among their target populations. Harm reduction-focused VMs continue to grow in popularity, particularly in the U.S., and have evolved to reflect changing harm reduction needs (e.g., VMs are now dispensing naloxone and drug testing kits). Long-term impact evaluation of the VMs, and implementation science frameworks are needed in future VM-related research to rigorously evaluate the VMs and help ensure their effective implementation and sustainability within the community.

Lawmakers must set aside outdated biases and adopt harm reduction tools that are effective. Vending machines are innovative, life-saving interventions—and we need more of them.

On June 26, the National Foundation for American Policy and the Cato Institute hosted a briefing for congressional staffers. I detailed how the Trump administration is carrying out its mass deportation agenda. Here’s the four-part plan I discussed:

1. Strip people of their legal status, legal protection, and citizenship.
2. Arrest based on convenience, not threat, and use of profiling.
3. Deny due process and judicial review of deportation plans.
4. Divert all governmental resources to this agenda.

Note that this was before the Supreme Court’s ruling in the birthright citizenship case, which has eroded the courts’ ability to stop violations of our rights with nationwide injunctions and could make it vastly more difficult to prove our citizenship going forward.

Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, explained the threats that the administration poses to legal immigration. His main point is that the Trump administration is massively restricting legal immigration, and again, this was before the news about further limits on stay for international students from this weekend.

You can watch the full event with questions and answers below:

The Senate is rushing to vote on its version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Republicans are using the budget reconciliation process to cut spending, extend the 2017 tax cuts, reform health care, increase border and defense funding, and deliver on many of President Trump’s campaign promises. 

Overall, the Senate bill is significantly more pro-growth than the previously passed House version, largely due to permanent full expensing and other business tax reforms. The bills include a partial repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) green energy subsidies, a welcome rollback of distortionary tax preferences. But both bills are packed with new and expanded tax credits and deductions that increase complexity, open doors to avoidance, and deliver little long-term growth. Worse, the Senate bill violates the House’s agreed-upon fiscal guardrails.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the Senate bill will add $3.3 trillion to primary (non-interest) deficits and likely another trillion or more dollars of interest costs and temporary tax policy gimmicks. The bill may still change as senators offer amendments. But as it currently stands, the large tax cuts, paired with insufficient spending cuts, mean that it violates the critical Fiscal Framework agreed to in the House budget resolution. 

Breaking this agreement should be a deal-breaker for House and Senate fiscal hawks. But permanent, pro-growth tax reform is within reach. Lawmakers can rein in the explosion of new and expanded tax breaks, roll back existing subsidies, and pair tax cuts with meaningful spending reductions.

More Growth

The bill permanently extends key provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including lower individual tax rates, a higher estate tax exemption, and, most importantly, immediate deductions for business investment (called full expensing). Deductions for equipment, machinery, and R&D are made permanent. The bill also temporarily extends similar treatment to a new category of “qualified production property,” mostly manufacturing structures. While industry-specific carveouts are not ideal, permanent expensing for structures would be among the most pro-investment reforms Congress could pursue. 

Thanks to these permanent provisions, the Tax Foundation estimates the bill will grow the economy by 1.1 percent over the long run, boosting investments, wages, and jobs, resulting in about $900 billion of dynamic revenues (20 percent of the static revenue loss). The House bill left these pro-growth incentives to expire, making it far less effective. Temporary tax cuts simply don’t move long-run investment or growth.

More Subsidies

Unlike the 2017 tax bill, which lowered rates by curbing special-interest tax breaks, this bill heads in the opposite direction, except for its commendable, but partial, repeal of green energy subsidies.

The Senate bill includes $509 billion in new or expanded tax credits, deductions, exclusions, and other pork, according to Arnold Ventures. These preferences carry real fiscal costs, add complexity, and deliver little long-term growth.

Among the biggest giveaways: a fourfold increase in the $10,000 state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, a federal subsidy to high-income taxpayers that encourages high-tax states to tax even more. Trump’s pledges to exempt tips and overtime pay are also included, with added guardrails in the Senate text. A $6,000 expansion of the deduction for the elderly nods to Trump’s promise to eliminate taxes on Social Security. The bill also creates “Trump Accounts,” complex child investment accounts seeded with $1,000 of taxpayer money. All of these provisions expire after 2028, hiding their true long-run cost.

The Senate also keeps all the House’s targeted tax breaks for children, employer childcare, paid leave, housing, student loans, seafood processing, rural development, farmers, adoption, and biofuels. On top of that, it adds new subsidies for economic development, advanced manufacturing, Alaskan whaling, remote native villages, and rum distillers in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Each of these is a complex, targeted tax preference, given at the expense of lower tax rates for all Americans.

One bright spot is the $517 billion repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits (about 60 percent of the total). These credits have proven costly and inefficient. Lawmakers should repeal more of these subsidies.

More Debt

The Senate bill is estimated to reduce revenue $4.5 trillion from the traditional CBO baseline over ten years (compared to the House’s $3.7 trillion). Both versions of the bill cut roughly $1.2 trillion in net spending. Thus, the House bill would increase primary (non-interest) deficits by $2.4 trillion. The Senate’s deficit effect clocks in at $3.3 trillion over ten years.

While far from fiscally sound, the House bill at least included a Fiscal Framework requiring any tax cuts beyond $2.5 trillion to be offset by additional spending cuts. To meet that standard, the Senate must find roughly $450 billion in additional offsets. That could mean more spending cuts or trimming half a trillion in new anti-growth tax subsidies.

Both versions of the reconciliation bill are likely to add additional trillions to the debt because they include many temporary tax cuts (more so in the House) and delay the most significant spending and tax credit reforms, daring future Congresses to cancel the savings.

Conclusion

Lawmakers should prioritize fiscal responsibility by staying within the fiscal guardrails agreed to in the House budget Fiscal Framework. Permanent, pro-growth tax reform is eminently doable by eliminating or scaling back the flood of new and expanded tax preferences, repealing costly subsidies already in the tax code, and cutting additional spending.

For a more in-depth analysis of the bills, see the following Substack posts:

“Tax Tracker | A Reading Guide for the Evolving Tax Bills”

“Debt Digest | One Big Bloated Blunder: What’s Wrong with the Senate’s Reconciliation Bill”

“Senate Tax Changes: More Growth, More Subsidies” 

“Tax Bill Falls Short of Pro-Growth Reform” 

With the Senate’s vote-a-rama now underway, here’s what you need to know about the reconciliation bill.

Romina Boccia speaks to BBC News about the Senate reconciliation bill. Last night, Boccia joined BBC News’ Sally Bundock to discuss the Senate’s reconciliation bill, which she called “one big bloated blunder.” She pointed to two potential amendments in today’s vote-a-rama session (a process allowing unlimited amendments) that could improve the bill: reducing the federal match rate for Obamacare expansion beneficiaries and cutting farm subsidies for wealthy farmers. If adopted, these changes could help the Senate meet the House’s $2 trillion deficit reduction target. Boccia warned that the bill’s current version “doesn’t provide any reassurance to US bondholders that Congress is in any way serious about addressing the unsustainable entitlement programs driving the growth in US spending that will eventually lead to a debt crisis.” She added that the bill’s modest cuts to social programs are “far outweighed by the additional pork, both on the spending side and on the tax side.” Watch the full interview below.

The Senate’s reconciliation bill would deliver more economic growth than the House’s version—but still blow up the deficit. Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, had this to say about the Senate’s reconciliation bill: “The Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill will deliver significantly more economic growth than the House-passed version, thanks to permanent investment expensing. But it also includes more than half a trillion dollars in new and expanded tax subsidies and other pork. The result? More debt. The bill will add trillions to the national debt and violate the House’s agreed-upon fiscal guardrails unless lawmakers scale back the pork or deliver more spending cuts.” For more on the differences between the tax proposals of the House and Senate versions of the reconciliation bill, see Michel’s analysis here and here.

Medicaid’s unfair Obamacare expansion may be curtailed. Sen. Rick Scott (FL) is advancing an amendment to the Senate reconciliation bill that would end the enhanced federal Medicaid match for ACA expansion enrollees after 2030. States would receive the standard federal match for new enrollees after that date, reducing a funding distortion that privileges able-bodied adults over the truly vulnerable and misallocates taxpayer resources. This reform is long overdue. Originally, Medicaid served low-income children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Obamacare expanded it to able-bodied, childless adults, offering states a much higher federal match—$9 for every $1 spent—compared to just $1.33 for the neediest. As covered in a Paragon Health Institute two-pager on the “Consequences of Medicaid’s Discrimination Against the Most Vulnerable,” the CBO projects that lowering the 90 percent federal reimbursement to the normal state reimbursement would save $710 billion over nine years (2026–2034). Congress shouldn’t delay this provision nor grandfather in current beneficiaries.

Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (IA) amendment to cap who can receive farm subsidies is a welcome measure in a bill otherwise packed with giveaways. It targets a fundamental problem: federal farm programs routinely line the pockets of relatively wealthy farmers under the guise of helping struggling farmers. Caroline Milear, a fellow at R Street, writes on X that “Sen. Grassley’s reconciliation amendment is a positive step towards stopping the corporate farm handouts and helping smaller producers compete in agriculture. Republicans who call themselves advocates of small government should all be in support!” Cato’s Chris Edwards previously covered the “brazen” farm subsidy increases in the reconciliation bill, stating that “Liberal critics are right that Republican efforts to cut low-income welfare in the reconciliation bill are hypocritical since the bill boosts high-income welfare for farmers.”

Budget gimmicks mask the Senate bill’s real price tag. In a post on X, George Callas, executive vice president of public finance at Arnold Ventures, highlights how the Senate uses budget gimmicks to hide the true deficit impact of the OBBBA: “A reminder that the Senate is NOT using a current policy baseline. If they were, then the new temporary tax cuts (tips, OT, etc.) would be scored as permanent. The Senate is using a different baseline for each tax cut, based on whatever does a better job of hiding the cost.” As Boccia has written before, “Americans deserve an honest conversation about fiscal policy and the tradeoffs involved—not creative accounting and budget gimmicks that allow politicians to keep spending like there’s no tomorrow. Because if we continue down this road, there won’t be a tomorrow where America’s finances—a key foundation of the nation’s economy—are still intact.”

The OBBBA’s senior tax giveaway would accelerate Social Security insolvency. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reports that the temporary additional senior deduction in the Senate version of the OBBBA would accelerate the Social Security trust fund’s insolvency. The CRFB explains, “Of particular relevance for Social Security beneficiaries, the Senate version of OBBBA would increase the total standard deduction for many senior couples by over $13,000 (including a temporary $12,000 increase in the additional senior deduction) in 2026, to over $47,000. This would reduce the number of seniors paying taxes on their benefits and reduce the marginal rate at which some of their benefits were taxed.” Boccia calls this temporary provision “a blatant vote-buying effort to benefit an electorally powerful group, who already receive 40 cents of every federal dollar on top of holding most of the nation’s wealth.”

This post originally appeared on The Debt Dispatch Substack. To get the latest fiscal updates—including the weekly Debt Digest newsletter—delivered straight to your inbox, make sure to subscribe.

With 65 speakers packed into a single day, the third annual Bitcoin Policy Summit in Washington, DC, had no shortage of topics. Conversations spanned the legislative agenda in Congress, the role of Bitcoin mining in strengthening energy grids, and the ways human rights activists have benefited from using Bitcoin.

Yet, as the day went on, there were two themes that repeatedly surfaced. Again and again, people pointed out that both the Bank Secrecy Act and capital gains taxation are long overdue for reform.

Bank Secrecy Act

Not one to mince words, Representative Warren Davidson (R‑OH) told the audience, “The Bank Secrecy Act was a massive infringement on [financial privacy].” The congressman is right. At a fundamental level, the Bank Secrecy Act (and the laws that followed under it) deputized financial institutions as law enforcement investigators. They are required to identify customers, track their activity, and report those customers to the government should anything seem suspicious or unusual.

Some people may be sympathetic to this idea. After all, wouldn’t you call the police if you thought someone broke into your neighbor’s home? Or if you saw someone being kidnapped? The difference here is that although officials cite the need to fight terrorists and human traffickers, the vast majority of the reports filed (75 percent) are for nothing more than someone using $10,000 or more in cash. In doing so, this regime prioritizes mass surveillance of innocent people over the pursuit of real criminals.

When it comes to enacting change, the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s head of policy, Zack Shapiro, put it well when he said, “We need to rewrite our illicit finance laws to protect us against [real threats] while not undermining the ability to use peer-to-peer technology.” Yaël Ossowski, deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center, later pointed out that Senator Mike Lee (R‑UT) introduced legislation that could do just that. In short, Senator Lee’s legislation would repeal mandatory reporting, strengthen the Fourth Amendment, and even prohibit the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Capital Gains

Capital gains taxation was another area of focus during the summit. Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer at Coinbase, noted that it’s often treated as a “lower-profile” issue but quickly added that it’s “enormously important.” The problem is that anyone who wants to use Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) to make a purchase must also pay capital gains taxes for doing so.

The process is almost tailor-made for discouraging the use of alternative moneys. First, capital gains tax rates are structured to incentivize long-term holding. Second, the complexity of administering the tax creates an additional burden on would-be users of cryptocurrencies. Where a sales tax is usually a flat percentage added on to the bill, capital gains taxes require a cryptocurrency user to report the sales price, cost, timeline, and gain or loss for each transaction to the Internal Revenue Service. And third, there’s always the looming threat of an audit should you make a mistake in this process.

Senator Cynthia Lummis (R‑WY) told the audience that she is currently trying to get an exemption in the reconciliation bill that would allow people to make purchases with cryptocurrency under an unspecified threshold without triggering capital gains taxation. However, she said that the effort has been stalled because the Department of the Treasury wants there to be a cap on how many qualifying transactions can be made in a year. As Ossowski pointed out, this restriction would be a step in the wrong direction. The threshold should be eliminated entirely so long as the transaction is to purchase goods and services (as opposed to cashing out).

Conclusion

So while Bitcoin’s promise continues to expand—from stabilizing power grids to empowering activists—two policies are still holding that promise back. The Bank Secrecy Act, conceived in an analog era, sweeps up financial records from countless innocent people while doing little to stop real criminals. And were that not enough, capital-gains rules punish anyone who tries to use cryptocurrency for its most basic purpose.

Narrowing the Bank Secrecy Act to target genuine threats would restore a measure of financial privacy without weakening crime-fighting tools. Exempting everyday cryptocurrency transactions from capital-gains tax would free consumers and merchants to use emerging technology as easily as cash. If lawmakers are serious about fostering innovation, protecting civil liberties, and keeping the United States competitive in the global digital economy, these are two prime areas for reform.

What follows is adapted from a statement I wrote on June 27 following the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, the universal injunctions/​birthright citizenship case:

Do courts have the power to tell the government to stop enforcing an unconstitutional measure, period, or may they only tell it to stop enforcing it against whoever sued? In the 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters case, whose centennial we celebrate this year, was the district court right to say that Oregon could not enforce its ban on private schools at all, or should it have told the state to stop enforcing the ban against the particular private schools that sued? In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), was the district court right to order the state not to expel any students who declined to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance, or should it have confined itself to the rights of the two Jehovah’s Witness children who sued?

Today, a majority of the Supreme Court rushed to declare a sweeping new ban on so-called universal injunctions. As a policy matter, there are serious arguments both for and against many uses of these injunctions, suggesting that resort to a single overarching rule might not make sense. And as Justice Sotomayor’s dissent makes clear, the historical materials on the extent to which court orders across American history have purposely vindicated the rights of persons not in court are a mixed bag, again not well suited to peremptory dismissal.

The most prudent—perhaps also the most equitable—course might have been for the Court simply to turn away the Trump administration’s request for stays and let ordinary litigation proceed in its course. As Sotomayor notes, that would be consistent with the idea that the federal government had not itself come to court seeking to do equity, as equity requires—it is instead attempting to subvert a precious and well-established constitutional right, that of birthright citizenship—and that it does not suffer what the law should deem “irreparable injury” by having to delay such designs.

Even in less dangerous times, the Court would have done better to leave the grandest issues raised in Trump v. CASA, Inc. for a later day. But the present moment—in which the Trump administration has launched a full-court press of deliberate lawbreaking and is seeking to escape the judicial scrutiny that inevitably follows—is a peculiarly inopportune time to clear the decks of supposed judicial obstruction.

More reading: Colleague Ilya Somin is generally critical but notes that “exactly how bad the consequences will be depends on the extent to which other remedies can be used to forestall them.” Anthony Sanders in The UnPopulist foresees bad results in cases where federal district courts respond to unlawful behavior by states or cities (often overlooked in the federal-centric coverage of this weekend). From the other side, Jack Goldsmith makes what I suppose is the most optimistic case available: that the decision 1) was long foreshadowed and would inevitably have happened at some point and 2) preserves in the Court’s own hands the basic tools needed for judicial restraint of executive illegality, provided this and future administrations actually live up to the representations made at oral argument of future compliance with Supreme Court rulings. (Which seems like a lot to stake on a “provided.”) And to be fair, I should mention that academic commentators whose work I usually find persuasive, such as Samuel Bray and Will Baude, believe Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority decision was correct on the law.

Cross-posted with minor changes from the author’s Substack.