The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suffering a crisis of institutional trust. Its woes have included the adoption of questionable legal theories, shifts in policy without public comment, and sending out poorly justified subpoenas. Reformers wonder how to address this trust crisis, and one option that might help is more intensive scrutiny by an Inspector General (IG). 

Currently, the bureau shares an IG with the Fed. The draft CFPB Reform Act of 2026 would (among other reforms) give the bureau its own IG (as does H.R.2513). If lawmakers support rigorous IG evaluations of the bureau’s compliance with constitutional case law, with statute law, and with accepted standards for cost-benefit analysis, this type of measure could bolster the bureau’s accountability. 

IGs are government watchdogs, conducting independent audits, inspections, and evaluations to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. Many audits are focused on financial or information technology issues. IG reports on the bureau usually cover topics such as purchase card management, payments to contractors, data security, or the management of the civil penalty fund. While valuable, such assessments do not get at the heart of the CFPB’s overreach. 

Read the rest of this post →

In July 2026, a group of 12 state attorneys general brought an antitrust challenge to Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Now, a judge has granted an order restraining the transaction for at least 14 days and preventing it from closing on July 22 as planned. It is possible that, regardless of the outcome of the case, the litigation could further delay the transaction.

The state case focuses on the potential impact of the transaction on movie theaters and basic cable distributors. But does this correctly understand the current entertainment market consumers experience?

Read the rest of this post →

In his July 16 speech, as he has done many times before, President Donald Trump portrayed America’s election system as riddled by fraud, illegality, and hacking vulnerability. He did not speak much about policy; instead, as I interpret it, he laid out in advance his rationale for planning to meddle with the system’s operation between now and the November midterms (and most likely beyond that as well). While he has mostly not disclosed (and perhaps does not yet know himself) what form this meddling will take, we do get a glimpse of one aspect of it, especially in light of comments made the next day by Secretary Markwayne Mullin of the Department of Homeland Security.

In particular, Trump said he has “ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately.” Election law scholar Ned Foley identifies the central legal problem here: “I don’t believe that DHS has been given authority from Congress to ‘direct’ states to make changes to their voter rolls, and I don’t believe that the President has either statutory or constitutional authority to order DHS to issue this directive to the states.” 

Read the rest of this post →

The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—Congress’s investigative watchdog—usually gets at least grudging cooperation from executive branch departments and agencies when conducting its audits. Yesterday, GAO released a terse two-page “review” of the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) proposed reductions in force (RIF) and reorganization plans and activities that revealed how OPM reacted to GAO’s inquiries:

To supplement GAO’s analysis of publicly available data, GAO requested documentation from OPM regarding changes made to offices or programs since 2025, the rationale behind the closure or consolidation of offices, and processes for strategic workforce planning, among other information. Other than comments on a preliminary draft of this report, OPM did not provide any requested documents or information, nor did it agree to meet with GAO or respond to written questions. As a result, in this report, GAO is unable to provide complete information on what changes OPM made, its rationale, the expected costs and benefits, and any effect on OPM’s ability to fulfil its mission. 

Read the rest of this post →

“Democratic socialists” are a growing movement on the political left. And many of them are also prison abolitionists. But there is a deep contradiction between their socialism and their abolitionism. As the history of actual socialist states shows, serious attempts to implement socialism lead to vastly greater incarceration (and other punishment), not less. There are several ways to try to escape this contradiction. But none work. The way to reduce incarceration is to reduce the range of activities we make illegal, not increase it.

What is Socialism?

“Socialism” here means government control of all or most of the economy, not simply an increase in welfare spending or a marginal increase in certain discrete types of regulation. That’s what actual leading socialists say they want. For example, the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), America’s most prominent socialist organization, states that it seeks to establish a system in which “[f]ood, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods.” That requires a complete government takeover of these massive parts of the economy. 

Read the rest of this post →

For years, the Jones Act has effectively cut off Puerto Rico’s access to mainland propane. The reason is simple: there are no Jones Act-compliant oceangoing LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) tankers capable of transporting it. The only possible uncertainty was whether Puerto Rico wanted American propane in the first place. Thanks to the March 2026 Jones Act waiver, that’s now settled.

Since the waiver took effect, Puerto Rico has imported roughly 809,000 barrels of mainland propane. That’s 4,792 percent more—nearly 49 times—the average annual volume shipped from the mainland during 2004–2025. Put another way, it’s more than twice the amount of mainland propane shipped to Puerto Rico during the previous twenty-two years combined.

Read the rest of this post →

New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee last week, delivering the Fed’s semiannual Monetary Policy Report. Both sessions covered important topics: a favorable June inflation report that Warsh declined to treat as “mission accomplished,” the Fed’s retreat from forward guidance, and pointed exchanges over the Fed’s independence from the White House. But an outsized share of the questioning, especially in the Senate, went to artificial intelligence (AI), leaving some key questions about the state of monetary policy unasked.

Obviously, the Fed has no direct control over how AI evolves. But senators pressed Warsh on whether the AI investment boom is inflationary and on the financial-stability risks posed by the newest AI models. His answer was that AI-driven price increases need not be inflationary, because supply should eventually catch up, and he described the internal Fed debate over AI spending as “one of the good family fights.”

Read the rest of this post →