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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President Trump has issued an executive order that requires the Smithsonian Institution to post 

new “temporary exhibits or signage” … outside the National Museum of American History (NMAH), “warning” visitors about “the Ideological Capture” of the museum.

The “ideological capture” is a reference to allegations that the White House made against leaders … in a blistering July 4 report[,] … accusing the museum and its leaders of presenting “a radical view of American history.”

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Last weekend, the tanker Paula Glory dropped anchor off Honolulu, having departed New Orleans four weeks earlier. Flagged in the Marshall Islands and riding low in the water—a sign of being fully laden—the vessel appears to be carrying fuel to Hawaii under the Jones Act waiver that took effect in March for energy and fertilizer products. If so, it will be the second foreign vessel to transport fuel to the Aloha State since March, further confirming the emergence of a domestic trade route with no precedent before the waiver.

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The proper delineation of authority between the federal government and the states has often been the subject of controversy in the debate over AI policy. Proponents of both approaches reference the constitutional clauses that support their claim. The reality is that this issue, as with many things in AI, is not a neat list of discrete policy matters. Instead, there is a clear mix of AI policy issues that require national attention—those that are the exclusive domain of the states and the issues that can be taken on by both the federal government and the states (or a collection of states). So how might a court or policymaker identify what level of governance is appropriate for different AI issues?

My paper, “The Obstruction Doctrine,” connects the jurisprudential dots that jointly establish a framework for evaluating whether a state’s exercise of power aligns with the letter and spirit of the Constitution. The first prong prevents states from inhibiting access to national markets. The second prong forecloses states from advancing laws that hinder the federal government’s ability to respond to issues that require national attention. And the third prong blocks states from interfering with national initiatives, such as extensive infrastructure projects. 

As the Federal Open Market Committee meets this week, the more telling story may be Chairman Kevin Warsh’s approach rather than the FOMC’s rate target decision. If his first meeting is any guide, he will say as little as possible; he has already declined to provide his own rate projections for the dot plot and significantly curtailed forward guidance. That restraint is deliberate, and it previews a far larger project. Warsh has launched five task forces to review how the Fed communicates, manages its balance sheet, uses data, understands productivity, and fights inflation.

Conducting a thorough review of monetary policy was the first recommendation we made when Warsh took office. The Fed adopted its flexible average inflation targeting regime in 2020, promised to let inflation run hot to make up for past shortfalls, and then presided over the worst inflation in four decades while calling it transitory. When the Fed ran its scheduled framework review in 2025, it revisited the wording of its consensus statement and little else. The five task forces are, in effect, the review that should have happened last year.

A new Cato briefing paper, released today, summarizes the best possible outcomes from this review. It works through each task force in turn, identifying the underlying problem and the reform that best addresses it. The recommendations differ in their particulars, but nearly all of them point in the same direction: The Fed serves the public best when it does less, not more. A well-functioning central bank commits to clear rules, holds a smaller footprint in financial markets, and leaves more room for prices and private information to do their work.

Communications is the cleanest illustration, and this week puts it on display. After 2008, the Fed came to rely on forward guidance, telling markets in advance what to expect and building an elaborate signaling apparatus around it. The goal was predictability, yet the result was often the opposite. Markets and incoming data usually offer a better real-time read of the economy than the Fed’s own forecasts, and guidance can drown out those signals. In September 2025, the data pointed to holding the rate target steady or even hiking, but the Fed had so firmly telegraphed a cut that reversing would have shocked markets—so it cut anyway, despite prevailing data.

Warsh’s instinct to say less is therefore a step in the right direction. If this meeting follows the pattern of his first—a shorter statement, little forward guidance, few clues about the path—that restraint is welcome. But restraint alone is fragile; it lasts only as long as the chairman who practices it. The durable fix is to replace discretionary communication with a rule. The Fed should publish its reaction function—a transparent formula linking its rate decisions to observable conditions—and let that stand as its communication. Predictability would then come from the rule itself, not from parsing a chairman’s silence, and forward guidance in its current form would become unnecessary.

The same logic runs through the rest of the paper. A balance sheet that ballooned past comfortable limits should be shrunk and simplified. A central bank that leans on slow, heavily revised government data should make room for faster private sources. A framework that bases policy on speculative productivity forecasts should instead rest on a rule. In each case, the reform narrows the Fed’s discretion and widens the space for markets and rules to operate.

None of this assumes the Fed can deliver perfect outcomes. It cannot. But a Fed that is more predictable, more accountable, and less intrusive than the one we have is a welcome step in the right direction.