Companies looking to do business with the Pentagon under President Trump are receiving some remarkably blunt instructions. At an acquisition reform event last November, Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg put contractors on notice. “The contractors that are willing to change with us will prosper and grow; those who don’t and resist it will be gone.”

Feinberg’s warning could be read as a demand that complacent contractors improve. But a LinkedIn post shared by George Kollitides, head of the Pentagon’s Economic Defense Unit (EDU), gives it a more troubling meaning.

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Almost exactly four years ago, amid an energy crunch triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, my colleague Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and I argued that Puerto Rico was overpaying for energy because the Jones Act restricted its access to American energy supplies. The evidence at the time was indirect but compelling, based on a comparison of Puerto Rico’s fuel imports to those of the nearby, Jones Act–unconstrained Dominican Republic. 

The US, we found, accounted for a meager 0.02 percent of Puerto Rico’s LNG imports in 2019 versus 10.8 percent of the Dominican Republic’s, and by 2021 the Dominican Republic’s share had risen to 96.4 percent while Puerto Rico’s had fallen to 0.002 percent. Propane and fuel oil also showed a stark divergence. The logical conclusion, based on sourcing decisions by market participants, was that Puerto Rico was almost certainly overpaying for energy it could have bought more cheaply from the country it’s part of—if not for the Jones Act.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just published details of how he plans to fulfill his campaign pledge to open five city-owned grocery stores across the city. On Monday, he released his “Recipe for Affordability” proposal and a call for grocery store operators to manage the coming stores. That confirms that rather than government-managed locations, these city-owned stores will really just be delivering a trumped-up subsidy.

The stores will carry a core basket of produce, meats, and other groceries placed on average 30 percent below market prices. But American supermarkets net just 1 to 4 percent profit margins on sales, so you can’t wring out a 30 percent discount just by forswearing profits. The proposal is therefore quite candid that the difference will be made up by taxpayers. It promises to “offer subsidies that will lower grocery prices” and admits that “sustaining these lower prices will require targeted public investment.”

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A key rationale for drug prohibition is the belief that outlawing drugs makes them less available and more expensive, thereby shrinking consumption.

Decades of evidence, however, suggest this impact is modest, partly due to the “waterbed effect”: enforcement efforts aimed at shrinking the market mainly cause it to shift, in various ways, without much impact on its overall size. Just as pushing down on one part of a waterbed merely forces the water somewhere else, rather than reducing the overall quantity.

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The bar exam is intended to be a test of minimum competency. Yet those who administer it have, time and again, demonstrated a lack of the minimum competency required to do their jobs effectively. 

When I sat for and passed the Colorado Bar Exam in July 2019, like many test takers, I approached the entire ordeal with precise, systematic planning. Seven years later, most of the fine details have faded. I cannot recall the exact Denver venue where I spent two full days answering questions on subjects I haven’t thought about since. Nor can I explain the mechanics of committing abstract legal concepts to rote memory just to regurgitate them in the exact format examiners demanded. What remains vivid is the immense financial and logistical toll required simply to sit in that room.

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Yesterday, I published a critique of the Transportation Institute’s claim that foreign ships operating under the current Jones Act waiver are unsafe, noting that these ships have lower rates of deficiency findings in US Coast Guard inspections than the domestic Jones Act fleet. This prompted a rebuttal, the centerpiece of which is that international Port State Control (PSC) inspections—the basis for its claims that foreign ships are dangerous—and domestic US Coast Guard Certificate of Inspection (COI) exams aren’t comparable systems. 

That’s a fair point worth engaging honestly. It doesn’t, however, rescue the group’s original argument.

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As speculation swirls around the future of the Jones Act waiver and whether it will be renewed, pro-Jones Act groups are stepping up their attacks on the law’s suspension. This week, the Transportation Institute (TI), a pro-Jones Act advocacy organization recently caught using misleading numbers in another anti-waiver attack, argued that foreign vessels operating under the waiver pose a threat to American infrastructure. 

To justify the claim, TI produced a graphic showing that approximately 53 percent of movements under the waiver between March 17 and July 15 involved a ship found to have a deficiency under Port State Control (PSC), the inspection regime by which countries check visiting foreign vessels. Standing alone, that sounds alarming. But if there’s a “gotcha” here, it works in the other direction.

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