Earlier this month, the United States Senate overwhelmingly passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The bill now heads to the House for consideration. The bill’s tariff title requires the president to impose duties of up to 100 percent on all goods from three sets of countries: the five largest importers of Russian crude oil; the five largest importers of Russian natural gas; and countries facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion. 

Our Cato colleague Scott Lincicome and Packard recently argued in The Washington Post that the bill’s tariff provisions are deeply misguided given how President Trump has abused other tariff statutes during his time in office, and Packard raised similar concerns with the bill in a Cato blog post last month. One criticism deserves more attention than it receives: the bill does not specify what data determines which countries make the list. 

Read the rest of this post →

Fox News congressional correspondent Bill Melugin stated on social media last week that “Biden released illegal alien crimes” are happening “all over the country,” but “almost nobody is being released now.” Official data, however, show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is releasing 184 immigrants per day, 41 percent of whom have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.

ICE is actually releasing more immigrants with criminal convictions and pending criminal charges than during President Biden’s term. Since January 2025, ICE has released 25,712 people with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, and over 2,000 had violent criminal records. The data complicate the narrative that President Biden was less committed to preventing criminal releases than Trump. 

Read the rest of this post →

Social Security is often described as a problem in 2032, when its insolvency will trigger automatic benefit cuts under current law. But the program has already been adding to federal debt for more than a decade. Since 2010, Social Security’s dedicated tax revenues have fallen short of benefit payments, and the federal government has financed the difference through additional borrowing. If Congress responds to trust fund exhaustion by borrowing to maintain scheduled benefits rather than reforming the program, the cost will grow dramatically.

Over the next 30 years, Social Security could add roughly $46 trillion to federal debt.

Social Security’s Contribution to Federal Deficits and Debt

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, which means that payroll taxes collected from today’s workers and income taxes on current benefits finance the benefits of today’s retirees. The resulting funding stream is the program’s cash flow, with the difference between tax revenues and benefit payments being the cash-flow balance.

Between 1983 and 2009, the program ran cash-flow surpluses, meaning its tax revenues exceeded benefit expenditures. These surpluses weren’t saved but were spent by the government on other, non–Social Security purposes. In exchange, the trust fund was credited with special-issue Treasury securities. These securities, referred to as trust fund “reserves,” represent intragovernmental IOUs, claims on the Treasury backed by prior cash-flow surpluses.

The trust fund’s securities have legal and accounting value for determining scheduled benefits under current law, but they do not represent net resources for the federal government as a whole. Redeeming them requires the Treasury to raise taxes, reduce other spending, or borrow from the public.

Since 2010, the Social Security system has run continuous cash-flow deficits, requiring the redemption of these intragovernmental IOUs to pay promised benefits. Because the federal government has been running budget deficits over this period, the Treasury has borrowed from the public to finance IOU redemptions and cover Social Security’s cash-flow gaps.

As a result, between 2010 and 2025, Social Security’s cash-flow deficits added about $1.4 trillion to federal debt. Importantly, a cash-flow deficit in a given year that’s financed by borrowing from the public also generates interest costs in subsequent years. To fully capture Social Security’s debt contribution, we’ve estimated those interest costs as well. (Download our methodology document, which illustrates how to calculate the interest costs associated with borrowing for the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance [OASI] program. Although the estimates presented here cover the combined Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance [OASDI] program—for consistency with the 30-year projections used elsewhere in this piece, projections the CBO has updated only for the combined program—the methodology itself is unchanged.) When including associated interest costs, Social Security’s 2010–2025 debt contribution rises to $1.6 trillion, with an additional $3.4 trillion projected by 2032 (Figure 1).

The Cost of Borrowing Beyond 2032

Once the trust fund is exhausted (estimated to happen in the fourth quarter of 2032), current law no longer permits the program to pay scheduled benefits without sufficient incoming revenue.

At that point, Congress will face three options: allow automatic benefit cuts to take effect, adopt structural reforms that put Social Security on a fiscally sustainable path, or amend the law and maintain scheduled benefits through borrowing. Borrowing would avoid an immediate benefit reduction but would not eliminate Social Security’s financing gap. It would merely transfer that gap to the federal government’s already strained balance sheet.

Under a borrowing scenario, Social Security’s cash-flow shortfalls between 2026 and 2056 would total approximately $25.4 trillion. Financing those shortfalls would generate an additional $17.1 trillion in interest costs over the same period. On top of that, Social Security–related borrowing between 2010 and 2025 would continue generating interest costs after 2026, adding another $3.9 trillion by 2056. Altogether, the program would add roughly $46 trillion to federal debt between 2026 and 2056. That represents about 34 percent of projected federal debt growth over the period.

Figure 2 separates Social Security’s debt contribution into its underlying cash-flow shortfalls and the interest costs generated by financing them. This distinction matters: Borrowing does not merely postpone the financing problem. Rather, it causes the shortfall to compound as interest accumulates on both current and prior borrowing.

Table 1 summarizes Social Security’s projected debt contribution through trust fund exhaustion, and over 10- and 30-year projection windows.

Borrowing to maintain scheduled benefits would impose costs beyond the additional debt itself. The Congressional Budget Office found that gross domestic product (GDP) would be about 1 percent higher in 2036 than in its baseline projection if benefits were automatically reduced after trust fund exhaustion instead of being financed through additional borrowing. Lower government debt would reduce interest rates and support private investment, while lower benefits would lead some individuals to work or save more.

Borrowing on this scale could also increase the risk of a broader fiscal crisis if bond markets demanded higher yields, further accelerating the dangerous debt trajectory. In a negative feedback spiral, higher debt could also worsen Social Security’s finances by reducing investment, wages, and the payroll tax base—effects that are not incorporated into the trustees’ projections.

Congress Must Reform Social Security—Not Borrow Around It

Using general revenues to maintain scheduled benefits would not solve Social Security’s financing problem. It would shift the program’s shortfall onto the federal budget, increase interest costs, and expose workers and taxpayers to the economic risks of higher debt. Borrowing may postpone benefit reductions, but it won’t make Social Security sustainable.

Congress should act—before trust fund exhaustion—while it still has time to phase in structural reforms and give workers and retirees time to adjust. Waiting would leave fewer options, require more abrupt changes, and increase political pressure to finance the gap with additional borrowing.

The central obstacle is not a lack of policy options but Congress’s inability to assemble and enact a workable reform package. A commission of independent experts modeled on the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process could help overcome political gridlock.

A BRAC-style commission would differ from past failed fiscal commissions in two important ways. One, it would consist of independent experts rather than elected representatives, insulating its recommendations from political pressures. And two, its recommendations would benefit from default adoption: Congress could reject the package, retaining final say, but not amend it. Importantly, a recent Cato Institute poll found that 71 percent of Americans support giving an independent commission such authority.

Social Security is not merely a future insolvency problem. It is already contributing to federal deficits and debt. Congress should act this year to reform the program—not borrow around it in 2032.

In November 2025, the Trump administration began rejecting some visa applicants based on health problems, asking if applicants and their children have “disabilities, chronic medical conditions, or other special needs.” On Tuesday this week, the State Department ordered a pause on all immigrant visa appointments worldwide to better train consular officers on more restrictive guidance, enforcing these rules as well as others intended to exclude immigrants likely to use public benefits.

Although some immigrants do become disabled, this analysis finds that immigrants, legal and illegal, were 24 percent less likely to be disabled than the US-born population in 2024, and were less likely to be disabled at nearly every age regardless of immigration status. Their lower disability rate led to significantly less use of disability benefits, but even disabled immigrants draw on those benefits less than disabled US-born citizens.

I was glad to read, in The Federalist, Daniel Brubaker’s recent piece, “Why Sharia Law Is Incompatible with the American Way of Life,” which took up on an earlier piece of mine in Al Hurra: “Why Sharia Courts Have a Place in Israel.” I was also humbled that Dr. Brubaker kindly introduced me as “perhaps the most articulate Muslim advocate of reconciling Islam with Western liberty.” But generous framing aside, I think his response missed some of my own argument’s finer distinctions and oversimplified the case I was actually making.

First, let me clarify what we are discussing. My piece never claimed that Islamic law, or sharia, is already compatible with liberal democracy in its classical, state-enforced form. It made a narrower and, I think, more useful claim: that a specific, limited kind of sharia observance—personal-status law administered by community courts that operate underneath, not above, a rights-protecting state—has a long working history in exactly the kind of societies Dr. Brubaker may want to defend: Israel and Greece, the latter being more liberal thanks to the European Court of Human Rights. If I had more space, I could add other non-Muslim states such as India, Thailand, Singapore, or Sri Lanka, which also maintain sharia courts for their Muslim citizens, adjudicating family matters such as marriage and divorce without violating national constitutions or laws.

These examples do not show “what Akyol wishes sharia to be,” in Dr. Brubaker’s words. They show existing realities in the world, which are much more complex than what most of the contemporary sharia alarmists in America imagine.

Read the rest of this post →

I have written before about Donald Trump’s strike suits—that is, the litigation he launches that is designed to terrify and silence critics and to extract cash from them. When a sitting president resorts to such tactics, it is especially disreputable and dangerous, because the plaintiff is also in control of large parts of an immensely powerful federal government that he can use for additional leverage. Trump’s strike suits have already engineered settlement payments from CBS, ABC, and YouTube; he is currently involved in ongoing litigation against the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Trump’s latest lawfare target, as signified by a demand letter his lawyer issued last week, is the Center for American Progress (CAP). In that letter, Trump attorney Alejandro Brito demanded that CAP “immediately retract the false, malicious, and defamatory statements made about President Trump” in a recent report it published. Brito then quoted a dozen sentences from the report that he claims are defamatory. With respect to just about every alleged defamatory statement that Brito listed, I cannot see how any competent attorney could ever believe that any of them meet the elements of defamation at all; furthermore, every single one of the statements that might qualify as defamatory is ultimately invulnerable to suit because of the actual-malice standards that originated in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).

For instance, one of the offending statements is the following:

The second Trump administration is trying to take credit for the historic drop in violent crime across America despite the fact that this trend began before it took office, and it is using these declines to justify expanding policies that are unpopular, ineffective, and costly.

Read the rest of this post →