When it comes to kids online, policymakers often have the best of intentions. Even if they radically disagree on what’s good for children, it is fair to say that most policymakers want to do something they believe will help and protect kids. 

But good intentions are not enough to make good policy. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently passed a package of bills centered around the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act) and the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). Sadly, these bills fail to keep kids safe and threaten online speech for everyone. 

KIDS Act

The KIDS Act combines several youth online safety-focused bills into a single proposal to create new requirements for how platforms treat children. However, these proposals would still have a far more significant impact on all users.

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Mohamed Bailor Jalloh murdered one person and injured two others in a terrorist attack on March 11 at Old Dominion University in Virginia. I immediately knew that Jalloh’s attack was motivated by Islamism because I knew of him from my earlier research on foreign-born terrorism. I listed Jalloh in my 2025 policy analysis on foreign-born terrorism as convicted of planning an attack in 2016 (see appendix), which he did as a naturalized immigrant from Sierra Leone. He was released from jail and then committed his recent attack in Virginia. 

Jalloh’s dastardly attack is one of five deadly foreign-born terrorist attacks during the second Trump administration that have killed a total of eight people. Six of them were victims of foreign-born terrorists motivated by Islamism and two by a right-wing terrorist who killed his parents to steal money to pursue his plot to assassinate President Trump to start a white supremacist ethnostate. In comparison, a single foreign-born terrorist killed one person during the Biden administration, and he was motivated by Chinese nationalism. 

Figure 1 shows the number of victims of foreign-born terrorism. It’s easy for the number of victims to vary so much over just a few years when there are so few. The number of victims of foreign-born terrorism in 2025 was the highest since 2017, when Trump was also in office, but just 0.03 percent of homicides last year were committed by foreign-born terrorists in attacks. 

The annual chance of being murdered in a foreign-born terrorist attack during the second Trump administration is about one in 85 million per year, about 16 times higher than during the Biden administration so far, which was about one in 1.3 billion per year. Regardless, it’s a tiny risk, even though fewer people were murdered in foreign-born terror attacks during Biden’s presidency than any other president since Gerald Ford and likely even earlier. 

Over 85 percent of all people killed by terrorists in attacks on US soil were killed by foreign-born terrorists since 1975. The 9/11 attacks account for 83 percent of those victims because they were the deadliest terrorist attacks in world history by a factor of nine.[i] Things have changed since 9/11, which occurred smack dab in the middle of my dataset. 

Last week, the Court of International Trade (CIT) delivered a victory for US importers that paid the “emergency” tariffs that the Supreme Court recently invalidated. Unfortunately, the companies’ fight may just be getting started. If so, the drawn-out process will likely deny many American firms the money that the government owes them and will likely cost taxpayers billions of additional dollars in interest. 

First, the good news. Last Wednesday, CIT Judge Richard Eaton ordered US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to cease collecting duties that President Trump unlawfully imposed last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and, in a surprise move, to immediately refund most of the duties already collected, with interest. The ruling settled some of the uncertainty we laid out in February, namely that the CIT will push the refund process quickly and will mandate refunds for all importers, not just those that have filed a lawsuit. Both are welcome moves toward getting American companies the billions they’re now owed by the US government—and toward limiting the damage to US taxpayers who must foot the bill for millions in interest that accrues daily on the shipments at issue.

Now, the bad news. In a filing last Friday, CBP acknowledged the government’s refund obligations but claimed that it does not have the technical capabilities to comply with the court’s order in the manner and time frame Judge Eaton set out.

First, the agency said that it can’t stop charging IEEPA tariffs on imports for which duty liability has not yet been finalized (i.e., “liquidated”). Citing the limitations of its online import processing system, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), CBP stated that “it is not possible for CBP to immediately prevent any additional entries from liquidating without IEEPA duties.” In other words, importers of the 20.1 million entries that remain unliquidated as of March 4 may still be charged IEEPA tariffs. (Four million of those entries are informal entries—shipments valued at less than $2,500—that have been assessed IEEPA duties; CBP claims it cannot prevent the automatic liquidation of these entries.)

Second, CBP told the court that it also can’t quickly refund duties for liquidated entries. In particular, CBP claims to lack the personnel and technical capacity to sort through the enormous number of entries, validate them, and distribute refunds. It warns that to process what has (unsurprisingly) become the largest mass-refund event in the history of US tariffs, it would need to pull staff from other crucial duties within the agency.

In response to CBP’s claims, Judge Eaton suspended the agency’s obligation to “immediately comply” with the refund order but required the agency to produce a report by today, March 12, on its progress in implementing the new capabilities. The agency just submitted that report, summarizing the new system’s main components and claiming that they were partially (40–80 percent, depending on the component) completed. 

The agency’s statements to the court are unsurprising: The US government is often a reluctant tax-refunder, and Trump administration officials have repeatedly indicated they’d resist blanket refunds. Yet CBP’s approach still raises several serious concerns: 

First, the implementation challenges that CBP says it now faces are predictable technical and logistical issues that the agency should have considered months ago, especially since the government lost the IEEPA tariff case in every court that heard it. That CBP is now scrambling at the 11th hour indicates that the agency made no efforts last year to prepare for the very real possibility of mass IEEPA refunds—even though about $700 million in additional interest is accruing for each month that CBP delays the refunds at issue. The agency’s predicament is a problem of the government’s own making, and we seriously doubt that American importers or taxpayers would be granted the leniency that the agency is now requesting from the court. It’s good that CBP is at least developing new capabilities to process and issue refunds electronically, but this should have been done months ago.

Second, CBP’s proposed refund system will inevitably let the US government keep much of the more than $165 billion in IEEPA duties that it illegally collected. According to CBP’s filing today, the refund system is not automatic but instead requires US importers to proactively request a refund by submitting detailed paperwork in the proper format via the importer’s ACE Portal accounts. CBP will then validate the file and its contents, rejecting anything that doesn’t comply with CBP’s rules. This new ACE functionality will therefore create additional administrative burdens for US importers, especially small companies that lack the sophistication and resources to jump through various bureaucratic hoops. For example, not every US importer has an ACE Portal account. Also, CBP’s March 12 filing indicates that entries that do not explicitly identify a Chapter 99 subheading of the US tariff code will not be processed automatically, even as CBP’s March 6 filing admits that importers “frequently” combine all applicable duties under Chapter 99 (including IEEPA, Section 232, Section 301, and other “temporary” tariff measures) and regular US most-favored-nation duties. Thus, importers whose entries are rejected would have to subsequently submit documentation verifying the IEEPA portion of the duties declared for those entries. CBP’s system may genuinely be well-designed for the trade professional class, but it assumes a level of customs sophistication and infrastructure that most small importers don’t have and thus ensures that many will be unable to get a timely refund. Moreover, certain unliquidated entries—including those subject to anti-dumping or countervailing duties (AD/CVD)—will not be processed by the new functionality.

Finally, it could take longer than 45 days for the new refund system to be implemented and even longer for tariff refunds to be processed. CBP’s 45-day timeline is only an estimate, as are the percentages in today’s filing. They are not a hard promise or a mandatory deadline, and CBP will likely have to issue guidance on using these functionalities before importers start using them to file for refunds. Only after the agency does so will the administrative refund process begin. Meanwhile, the interest clock will be ticking.

The Trump administration previously assured courts that issuing refunds to importers whose entries had been liquidated and validated would be quick and easy. Its proposed system is neither. The government also might appeal the CIT’s order up until May 4, meaning more delays and uncertainty—and more needless costs for importers and taxpayers. The Trump administration lost, repeatedly, in court, and the law is clear that illegally collected taxes must be returned to the payer of said taxes, with interest. Appealing the CIT’s order would be a costly case of sour grapes, but it’s a definite possibility.

For both legal and ethical reasons, IEEPA tariff refunds should be fast, automatic, and comprehensive. Any administrative burdens will inevitably and unfairly punish small companies, reward their larger competitors, and cost taxpayers millions. The longer the US government delays refunding IEEPA tariffs—money that importers dutifully paid, despite the financial pain and dubious legality—the more likely it is that American companies with limited capital tied up in customs bonds and high-interest debt struggle financially or resort to costly external arrangements (e.g., selling tariff claims to Wall Street banks for pennies on the dollar) to keep their businesses afloat. It’s thus imperative that CBP go back to the drawing board and create a truly automatic IEEPA refund system that guarantees US importers receive the money they’re owed.

The IEEPA tariff saga never should’ve started. The least the Trump administration can do now is to quickly issue refunds and end this farce once and for all.

War and economic turmoil have a way of focusing policymakers’ attention. Amid rising energy and fertilizer costs in the fallout from escalating conflict in the Middle East, the Trump administration is reportedly set to waive the Jones Act, the 1920 law requiring that domestic waterborne transportation be conducted on US-flagged vessels built in American shipyards.

It’s instructive. Although routinely defended as essential to national security, Jones Act waivers are often floated precisely when a genuine national security crisis or economic emergency arises. It’s an implicit acknowledgment by policymakers of what the law’s defenders rarely admit: It constrains transportation options and raises costs. A law portrayed as indispensable to national security suddenly becomes optional when pressures mount.

The Jones Act’s restrictions are particularly stark in the context of energy transportation. Of the world’s nearly 7,500 tankers for moving crude oil and refined products, just 54 comply with the law. And those that do are dramatically more expensive than their international counterparts. Constructing a medium-range tanker suitable for carrying gasoline or jet fuel in a US shipyard costs roughly $190 million more than building one abroad. Building a crude oil tanker is said to cost over $400 million more. Annual operating costs run $8 million–10 million higher per vessel.

Combine those cost premiums with a minuscule fleet size and the result is predictable: Coastal tanker shipping in the United States is structurally expensive.

Unsurprisingly, defenders of the law have pushed back against the idea of a waiver. Most prominently, the CEO of a Jones Act tanker operator recently argued that because international tanker charter rates have surged amid the current crisis, allowing foreign-flagged ships into domestic trades would provide little benefit.

But such thinking misses the bigger picture. By opening domestic routes to internationally flagged shipping, relief from the Jones Act would vastly increase the supply of vessels available to move American crude oil and refined products to US ports. That, in turn, would unlock new and more efficient supply chains.

For example, only a single Jones Act–compliant crude oil tanker currently serves the East Coast. With additional ships, US refineries could more easily source oil from Texas rather than import it from Libya or Nigeria. California, which currently imports fuel from the Bahamas as a costly Jones Act workaround, could obtain it more directly from the Gulf Coast. 

This isn’t controversial. A 2017 Financial Times story included the observation that “if there was not a Jones Act, then there probably would be more movements of crude oil from Texas to Philadelphia.” The source of that quote? The same Jones Act tanker firm CEO who recently downplayed the benefits of waiving the 1920 law.

And the benefits of Jones Act relief go well beyond oil and fuel. Among liquefied natural gas tankers, only a single compliant vessel exists, and it is restricted to serving Puerto Rico. Among oceangoing dry bulk carriers, the workhorses of fertilizer transport, precisely zero exist in the Jones Act fleet. 

Expanding the fleet of vessels capable of meeting domestic transportation needs would improve flexibility and reduce distortions in an economy under strain.

It’s important, however, to set realistic expectations. A waiver will not produce dramatic drops in fuel costs. Transportation is just one of many factors that determine prices at the pump, and the current price environment reflects global supply disruptions that no domestic shipping policy can fully offset. But it is equally wrong to claim a waiver would do nothing. By the industry’s own admission, eliminating the Jones Act would increase domestic energy movements. That means fewer market distortions and more competitive pricing at the margin.

There is no question about the directional impact of Jones Act relief, only the magnitude.

In a moment when Americans are facing elevated energy and input costs, policymakers should be willing to remove barriers that serve no purpose beyond protecting a small fleet of expensive vessels. A Jones Act waiver may not deliver dramatic price declines—only an end to the misguided US military action in Iran will do that. But it would expand capacity, enhance competition, and ease constraints in a stressed system.

There’s also a larger point to consider. If the Jones Act must be suspended to address national security emergencies, why do we keep it in place during times of peace? Why keep it around at all?

Petitioner Antonio Smith suffered extraordinary, deliberate, and unconstitutional mistreatment at the hands of several Wisconsin prison officials in November 2017. After being pepper-sprayed for non-violent resistance to an unwanted medical examination, he was placed naked in a freezing control cell for 23 hours, in defiance of well-established prison procedures. His direct requests for clothing and bedding were denied, and one officer went so far as to condition the provision of these necessities on Mr. Smith abandoning his ongoing hunger strike protesting prison conditions.

In 2025, the Seventh Circuit unanimously agreed that Mr. Smith’s claims made out a viable Eighth Amendment violation, and his case closely parallels the set of “particularly egregious facts” that, according to the Supreme Court’s most recent word on the subject, “any reasonable officer should have realized offended the Constitution.” 

Nevertheless, a majority of the lower court held that qualified immunity prevents Mr. Smith from presenting his constitutional claims to a jury because they were not “clearly established.”

Cato, joined by the American Association for Justice, Public Justice, and Due Process Institute, filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to grant review of the case and vacate the decision. Sufficiently obvious constitutional violations do not require plaintiffs to identify prior cases with functionally identical facts to overcome qualified immunity. Moreover, this case illustrates pointedly how the current qualified immunity regime both denies juries their fundamental role in ensuring public accountability and exacerbates an ongoing crisis of confidence in public institutions, especially law enforcement.

Rights are only as strong as the remedies that secure them. The Seventh Circuit acknowledged that Mr. Smith’s rights were violated but nevertheless held that the law afforded him no relief. A system that openly acknowledges a violation yet denies a remedy for want of identical precedent is one of caprice rather than principle.

A week and a half into the Iran war, supporters of the conflict have already begun proposing new ways to achieve its shifting objectives. The latest, and perhaps most ambitious, has been to use Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids to seize Iran’s dispersed stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. Proponents argue that such raids could accomplish a critical war aim without committing the United States to another “forever war.” In reality, the so-called “commando option,” while perhaps technically feasible, would be extraordinarily risky, operationally complex, and unlikely to accomplish its stated mission.

Iran’s nuclear facilities—such as Fordow and Natanz—are large, heavily fortified installations. A small team of SEALs or similar “Tier One” operators would be insufficient. The initial assault alone would require a company-sized element, or larger.

Similarly, the assaulting force would require a considerably larger blocking force to control access to the site and repel a possible attack. Depending on the terrain and the size of the facility, the blocking force alone could approach battalion strength (1,000+ personnel). Additionally, the assaulting force would require specialized troops and equipment, such as engineers and earthmoving equipment, all of which would greatly complicate an already daunting logistical problem.

And then there is the issue of time. The colloquial use of the term “raid” implies speed and precision. The clearing, securing, and exploiting of each site would take considerably longer than a traditional SOF raid. The team would need to achieve its mission while presumably under hostile fire. Each raid could quickly devolve into a pitched battle against an enemy capable of bombarding American forces with missiles and drones from relatively close range, limiting the ground force’s ability to respond. While the US has demonstrated an ability to defend fixed installations against such weapons, its experience in defending troops in the field is limited. Such a risky operation would be an unwise venue to test such a capability.

The operation itself would be a daunting undertaking, but its logistics would be even more so. Setting aside the issues of getting such a force into one of these sites, the question becomes how to extract the seized uranium—all 970 pounds of it—from deep inside Iranian territory. And that is just what is known.

Finally, such an operation would likely have to be executed not once but repeatedly—perhaps indefinitely—as the Iranian regime has dispersed its stockpile.

Special Operations Forces cannot do everything. They are a scalpel that policymakers in Washington, DC, have tended to use as a multitool. Their proposed use in Iran for seizing the regime’s stockpile of enriched uranium is but the latest idea in this trend. It is also the most reckless—an idea closer to fantasy than to feasibility.