Investing

Stephen Richer

“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections.” —Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, United States District Judge

On April 24, US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked the highest profile part of President Trump’s March 25 executive order on election administration. That part, Section 2(a), directed the United States Election Assistance Commission to change the federal voter registration to require documented proof of citizenship.

I’ve written before that I agree with the president’s aspiration to require documented proof of citizenship for all American voters. Currently, federal law only requires legal attestation of citizenship.

But, as Walter Olson wrote previously for this blog, “Of the various components of the order, there are some that I might agree would be good ideas .… But the substantive merits shouldn’t be at center stage here. New laws should be passed by lawmakers, not by decree.”

Judge Kollar-Kotelly agreed with Olson; the executive order is procedurally and legally deficient. The president does not have unilateral authority to shape election policy.

This should have been obvious to the president. After all, the Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, and that major piece of federal election law specifically assessed proof of citizenship: “The Conference Committee on the bill that became the NVRA considered and rejected an amendment proposed … to require presentation of documentation relating to citizenship of an applicant for voter registration.”

More obviously, the US Senate is currently considering the much-discussed SAVE Act, which proposes to do the very thing the president wants—require proof of citizenship for voters. Congress wouldn’t go to the trouble of drafting, negotiating, and politicking the bill if it could simply be done by the president with one signature.

In addition to ignoring the Congress, President Trump’s Executive Order also forgets that states possess “the power to regulate the time, place, and manner” of elections. As summarized by Judge Kollar-Kotelly, “the States have initial authority to regulate elections. Congress has supervisory authority over those regulations. The President does not feature at all.”

There is wisdom to this diffusion of election authority. As one of the Constitution drafters, Theophilus Parsons, wrote, the distribution of election administration power guards against “the influence of ambitious or popular characters, or in times of popular commotion, and when faction and party spirit run high.”

This now resonates with many Democrats and liberal nonprofits. Though they spent much of the past four years trying to federalize election administration through the “For the People Act (HR 1),” they now embrace federalism and limitations on the executive. Welcome, I suppose, to the Cato Institute.

It remains to be seen if the president will appeal the injunctive order. Judge Kollar-Kotelly allowed other parts of the executive order to survive an injunctive pause and proceed down the civil litigation process.

This case encompassed lawsuits filed by various nonprofit groups, as well as national Democratic organizations. There are two other lawsuits challenging the legality of the president’s executive order—one filed in Massachusetts by Democratic attorneys general from 19 states and one by the states of Oregon and Washington.

Thomas A. Berry and Charles Brandt

President Donald Trump has proclaimed himself a “drainer of the swamp” and enemy of the “deep state.” But in the Supreme Court, his administration is working to save an unconstitutional and democratically unaccountable component of the Affordable Care Act.

Under the ACA, health insurance companies are required to cover certain “preventive services” without copays. Who makes the final decision as to which services must be covered? That important determination is left to a 16-person body called the US Preventive Services Task Force. Under the law, the Task Force must be “independent and, to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.”

The most natural reading of this requirement is that Task Force members cannot be removed from their offices except for good cause, and a higher-up within the executive branch cannot reverse their coverage decisions.

The Task Force makes decisions resulting in one-size-fits-all coverage mandates, which can be onerous burdens on small businesses. One such business is Braidwood Management, which sued the government after objecting to a coverage requirement.

Braidwood argues that the Task Force is unconstitutional because its members are neither appointed by the president nor confirmed by the Senate. Under the Constitution’s “Appointments Clause,” the Senate confirmation process is mandatory for all officers of the United States except “inferior” officers. Braidwood argues that Task Force members are not subject to any meaningful oversight within the federal government and thus cannot be mere “inferior” officers. If Braidwood is right, then all current members of the Task Force hold their offices illegally, and their decisions are void.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with Braidwood and held that the Task Force members are non-inferior (or “principal”) officers who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Now the case is before the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments this week. (Cato filed an amicus brief supporting Braidwood.) And although the White House has changed hands during the litigation, the Trump administration has taken up the mantle of defending the Task Force’s constitutionality.

This choice is surprising. When the president agrees with the decision of a court below invalidating a law, his administration can choose not to defend the law and leave that defense to either another branch of government or a private attorney serving as a friend of the court. That is what the Obama administration did when it chose not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act before the Supreme Court in the 2013 case United States v. Windsor. So, Trump’s choice to defend a provision of the ACA was not a foregone conclusion.

Unfortunately, presidents of both parties have long urged the courts to weaken the structural protections of the Appointments Clause. Senate confirmation can stand in the way of the president appointing his preferred officers. But the Framers of the Constitution understood that this check was important. As Alexander Hamilton predicted in Federalist 76, the Appointments Clause has helped “to prevent the appointment of unfit characters.” For example, without an Appointments Clause, we would currently have Attorney General Matt Gaetz.

Thus, it perhaps should not be surprising that the Trump administration has chosen to argue that Task Force members are mere “inferior” officers and that they may permissibly be appointed without Senate consent. If the Supreme Court agrees with the administration, it would set a precedent that would likely allow other consequential government positions to be filled unilaterally, by the president alone or by a cabinet member. That unfortunate result would mean that important final government decisions affecting our daily lives would be made by officials whom the Senate has neither vetted nor voted on.

The Supreme Court should instead draw a bright-line rule: the Senate must confirm government officials who can make final decisions for the executive branch. Such a ruling would not seriously undermine the work of the Task Force because President Trump would be able to simply nominate new members. Those nominees would then finally go through the process that Task Force members should have gone through for more than a decade: Senate review and confirmation.

Alex Nowrasteh

Cato recently published my newest policy analysis, “Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010–2023,” co-authored with Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Michelangelo Landgrave, who was also my former intern. This policy analysis is an updated version of earlier papers with newer data. Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated.

A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because Black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that Black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high Black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering Black native-born rates.

Excluding Black native-born Americans and Black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding Black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only Black native-born Americans and keeping Black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.

It’s worth pointing out that legal and illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates than their ethnic and racial counterparts in the native-born population in every case. Furthermore, Black legal or illegal immigrants do not have the highest incarceration rates. Immigrants don’t just have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans because Black Americans have such a high rate, but because immigrants of every racial and ethnic group have lower incarceration rates than their native-born ethnic and racial counterparts. 

Colleen Hroncich

The 4th Annual National Hybrid Schools Conference is taking place today at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, so it’s fitting to feature a hybrid school this week.

After a 17-year career as a public school teacher, Sarah VanDerVliet wanted something different. She was an ag teacher, so she ran the Future Farmers of America (FFA) chapter along with the school’s farming and agricultural programs. Sarah and her husband have a farm, and they were trying to figure out a way for her to be home more and working on the farm. They toured a farm in Nebraska in early 2022, and the conversation landed on homeschooling and the hybrid model the family used. “We just talked the whole way home and thought maybe this is something we want to do,” Sarah recalls. “It was just crazy how instantly it was like, OK, I’m going to start a school. That’s what we’re going to do.”

Sarah got a group of parents together who she knew had been considering homeschooling or were already homeschooling. “We just started brainstorming ideas, like what does this look like? How do we do this? And then it basically was God-led from there,” she says. She completed the rest of the school year along with her summer FFA duties. Buffalo Christian Homeschool Academy opened in Colton, SD, in September 2022, just six months after Sarah learned about the hybrid model. 

The school meets two days a week in a converted farmhouse on the family farm. There are currently 31 students ranging from first through twelfth grade. Parents handle math and English at home since those are subjects where skill levels can vary a lot. Doing them at home allows kids to go at their own pace in a smaller setting. The agriculture aspect is a big part of Buffalo Christian, so they learn about animals, including how they’re processed for food, gardening, beekeeping, dairy, and more. Sarah also covers social studies, history, science, spelling, book reports, and reading.

They start the day with prayer, pledge, and devotion. Then Sarah does a group lesson—recently they’ve been learning about egg processing and fermentation. She incorporates a lot of hands-on projects. For example, with the fermentation, they did an experiment to watch how yeast and water reacted with various grasses and starches that the kids found on the farm. Then they split into smaller groups that might include history lessons, science experiments, or working on book reports. Sarah has an aide who works with one group while she’s working with the other. They also have time for electives, which include activities such as leatherworking, wood burning, and engraving with a GlowForge.

“I know it kind of sounds crazy, but it’s kind of like a hodgepodge,” Sarah says with a chuckle. “We group accordingly. Sometimes it’s K‑4, sometimes it’s K‑5, sometimes it’s 5–8, sometimes it’s 7–12, sometimes it’s K‑12. It really just depends on what needs to be accomplished. We kind of divvy accordingly. So every day is a little different.” Each day she creates a schedule of what they need to accomplish, and they just roll through it. 

One of Sarah’s biggest challenges was incorporating FFA into her school. “If you want to be part of FFA, you have to take an ag education class because they’re intracurricular, so it all goes together—your classroom, your FFA—and then there’s a record book portion on the kids’ projects,” she explains. That meant she would have to drive them to the public school twice a day because one class met in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Since her degree is in ag education, she talked with the state program leaders, and they allowed Sarah to start the first homeschool chapter in South Dakota.

Sarah says her kids love being part of the hybrid school. She’s always told them they can go back to the public school at any time, if they want, but they aren’t interested, even though they didn’t have a bad experience at school. “I think they just love being home,” she says. “We’re a farming family, so there’s always stuff to do. And the kids are helping on the farm so much, and it’s just really made our family life healthier. It’s made our family unit stronger. And so I think the kids love that, and they love the freedom and flexibility.”

Clark Packard, Scott Lincicome, and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon

Following remarks from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this week suggesting that a tariff de-escalation with China would be coming soon, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that the Trump administration is considering slashing its tariffs on Chinese imports to between 50 and 65 percent. Given that the average US tariff rate on Chinese imports currently sits at 124 percent, this cut would provide some relief to a US economy that imported nearly $440 billion worth of goods from China in 2024. Yet, it would nevertheless mean that the average import from China would continue to be subject to rates around two to three times higher than the average tariff rate on Chinese imports when the second Trump administration began—and about 13 to 17 times higher than before the first Trump administration’s trade war with Beijing began in 2018.

American consumers—both individuals and firms—will bear the brunt of these increased taxes. Indeed, for American businesses that rely on imports from China, including American manufacturers for which China is an essential player in their often-complex supply chains, this means that these cuts—which would have been drastic in any other era of US trade policy—do not amount to a significant reprieve from the damage that’s already been done.

To illustrate this point, our Cato colleague Scott Lincicome recently sat down with Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources—a Chicago-based manufacturer of educational toys for young children—to discuss the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on his business. Woldenberg told Lincicome that his business manufactures about 60 percent of its products in China and that his company had paid $2.3 million on tariffs last year. At current 145 percent rates, he calculates his company’s 2025 tariff liability would increase an astounding 44 times, to $100.2 million. Thus, even if the White House slashed the tariffs to the reported 50 to 65 percent, they would nevertheless continue to represent an unsustainable cost for his business. Lincicome then asks Woldenberg how his company is operating today with the costs and uncertainty hanging over it, and his answers deserve to be heard in full:

Woldenberg raised additional points that further underscore the harms of the White House’s tariffs, the uncertainty they have engendered for businesses like his, and the disconnect of the president’s trade strategy with the reality of modern American manufacturing. Given the fatal risks the tariffs pose to his company, Woldenberg announced during the interview that Learning Resources filed a lawsuit on April 22 challenging the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs. The full discussion will be available on Cato​.org soon.

Let’s hope that decisionmakers in the White House are finally realizing the full extent of the damage that their misguided and hastily crafted tariff plans are inflicting on millions of everyday Americans.

Neal McCluskey

The federal government should not be telling schools what their discipline policies will and will not be. Ideally, those decisions would be made by freely operating educators and families in a system of school choice. Absent that, schools and districts ought to be able to make their own decisions, and the feds should only intervene if there is significant evidence of discipline driven by racial or other group-based animus.

That is not how the Obama and eventually the Biden administrations saw things. They declared that if discipline policies had “disparate impact”—any group was disciplined out of its proportion of the overall student population—a school or district was suspect. This made every public school in America a potential target of federal scrutiny and incentivized dubious—and possibly dangerous—discipline policies.

President Trump’s executive order (EO), issued yesterday, largely undoes that stance, which is a clear move in the right direction. What is not clear is the degree to which Trump will try to dictate policies of his own. The EO calls for new guidance from various departments about discipline policies that steer clear of “discriminatory-equity-ideology-based school discipline and behavior modification techniques.” This could just mean ending disparate-impact avoidance, but it could also constitute a prohibition on approaches such as “restorative justice” that might be bad in practice but are not Washington’s business. 

It is also not the federal government’s job to create “model school discipline policies.” Nonetheless, the EO calls for creating model policies that “are rooted in American values and traditional virtues.” A model, presumably, will not be imposed, but nowhere among the specific, enumerated powers in the Constitution is there warrant to even create that.

It is definitely an improvement to get away from the Obama/​Biden approach to school discipline. But it will be a lost opportunity to let federalism work if the Trump administration exchanges one imposition for another.

And speaking of opportunities, Trump also released a new EO on college accreditation yesterday. Andrew Gillen discusses it here and finds it promising.

Andrew Gillen

President Trump signed an executive order concerning accreditation in higher education yesterday that could be a game-changer.

For those of you who’ve never heard of accreditation, it is the quality assurance mechanism used to (attempt to) safeguard taxpayer funding in higher education. If a university wants its students to be able to receive Pell Grants or take out student loans, then it must get the approval of an accreditor. Accreditors themselves are quasi-private entities that evaluate colleges to maintain (in theory) a minimal level of quality.

Accreditation suffers from a host of problems. A recent paper of mine documents the biggest ones, which fall into three buckets: foundational (e.g., accreditors fail in their quality assurance role), public-choice (e.g., accreditors abuse their power as gatekeeper for taxpayer funding), and operational (e.g., accreditors focus on inputs and processes as opposed to outputs and outcomes).

The problem is that there isn’t a clearly better way to provide quality assurance in an environment with heavy taxpayer subsidies. The federal government taking over from accreditors would be terrible—it wouldn’t weed out low-quality colleges, it would reduce university autonomy and diversity, it would suppress innovation, and it would lead to the politicization of education. But the market wouldn’t work either since the available government subsidies in the form of Pell Grants and student loans so distort price signals and market discipline and feedback that it would result in even more wasteful government subsidization in higher education. There are ways to address this problem, including eliminating government financed student loans, but until then, we should fix accreditation.

Which brings us to Trump’s executive order. I see four promising aspects of the order.

Hold Accreditors Accountable When They Abuse Their Power

One of the problems with accreditation is that it allows accreditors to abuse their power by using the threat of cutting off taxpayer funding to force colleges to dance to the accreditor’s tune. For example, in the early 2000s, George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School resisted racial preferences until the law school accreditor “threatened the institution with revocation of its accreditation on account of its alleged diversity problem.” This order could reduce this type of abuse of power by putting accreditors on notice that similar behavior could lead to termination of their recognition (only “recognized” accreditors have gatekeeping power over taxpayer funds).

Open the Door for New Accreditors

The Biden administration inexplicably ceased accepting new applications from potential new accreditors. This exacerbated the already shockingly low rate of entry of accreditors—there hasn’t been a single new one approved in 73 years that wasn’t severely restricted in which colleges it could accredit. The order ends this freeze, and it would be great news if it resulted in new accreditors being recognized.

Change the Way Accreditors Make Their Decisions

Institutional accreditors accredit entire universities, whereas programmatic accreditors accredit only within a specific academic field. Institutional accreditors paint with too broad a brush. A university could have a great physics department and a terrible chemistry department, so institutional accreditation either unjustly punishes the physics department or lets the chemistry department escape accountability. The order directs the Department of Education to encourage institutional accreditors to use program-level data, which is a long overdo step.

Experiment with New Accountability Systems

Perhaps the most exciting component of the order is the directive to experiment with a new voluntary accountability system. Done right, this could be used to prototype or even establish a better accountability system. For example, why not base a program’s eligibility for student loans on repayment rates of past students in the program? This could dramatically streamline reviews, while at the same time doing a better job of terminating eligibility for programs that destroy economic value.

Overall, whether this executive order results in anything good remains to be seen, but it lays out some promising paths. 

Neal McCluskey

Two major functions of the Department of Education are funding and enforcing education for students with disabilities. I tackle these next in our series about what to do with different US education jobs as the department ends. Andrew Gillen first covered student loans, and then I wrote about the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

A lot of what the Education Department does for students with disabilities is civil rights enforcement, particularly under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) but also under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014. As discussed regarding all OCR functions, enforcement of civil rights for students with disabilities should be moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which is already tasked with civil rights enforcement for people with disabilities in education and beyond. If the DOJ believes it needs more resources to take on work formerly done by the OCR, it should make the case to Congress.

Civil rights enforcement is a proper federal role under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Providing funding for students with disabilities, while well-intentioned, is not.

Ideally, all funding, in both formula and discretionary grant forms, would be phased out. But if it is not, responsibility for distributing education funds, such as the $14.2 billion in formula grants to states under the IDEA, should go to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Workforce and rehabilitation funding should go to the Department of Labor (DOL). The HHS has its own disability services—not to mention its Office for Civil Rights—while the DOL already works with people with disabilities.

It would also be wise, if they are not eliminated, to consolidate the many discretionary grant programs into block grants that states can distribute according to their particular needs. It is also worth looking into curbing incentives to overdiagnose disabilities. While many factors likely play into the increases in reported disabilities that we have seen over the decades (shown below), it is notable that while physical disabilities do not appear to have grown, diagnoses of specific learning disabilities, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism—disabilities that are difficult to detect, unlike, say, blindness—have increased considerably.

Federal disability funding and accommodations create an incentive for students to receive such diagnoses. Parents might push for a diagnosis to ensure their children are not penalized relative to their peers who are given additional time for schoolwork and exams. And schools might overdiagnose to secure additional funding or accommodations for students in test-based accountability regimes. Such overdiagnosis would be a wasteful use of resources and could reduce support and services for students who truly need them.

Finally, federal disability law creates a “lawyers’ playground”—an inherently legalistic, conflictual system in which parents who think their children need particular services or educational approaches must battle school districts. A better solution is education choice, with money following children to diverse educational options, an approach we have seen explode in the past few years. Often, it is a change in pedagogical approach, not treatment for a disability, that a child needs.

More freedom and parental power, not bureaucratic federal promises, should be the focus of assisting students with disabilities.

Jeffrey A. Singer

Critics warned it would lead to widespread abuse. Yet, in October 2018, Canadian lawmakers made Canada the first G7 country to legalize, not merely decriminalize, recreational cannabis.

Researchers at McMaster University have conducted a prospective cohort study involving 1,428 adults in Hamilton, Ontario. Some participants were cannabis consumers before legalization, while others began using cannabis post-legalization, between September 2018 and October 2023. Their findings were published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The results:

Cannabis use frequency increased modestly in the 5 years following legalization, while cannabis misuse decreased modestly.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol, cannabis, and illicit substance use spiked in most countries. Researchers found that after the pandemic’s onset, cannabis misuse (or cannabis use disorder) experienced a sharp reduction and has not yet returned to prior rates. The most significant drop occurred among individuals who were frequent users before legalization.

Overall, during the study period, individuals who frequently used cannabis before legalization tended to reduce their consumption, while those who had not previously used cannabis were more likely to increase their use. Misuse declined among all groups that were already using cannabis before legalization. Researchers observed a rise in misuse among those who had previously abstained—an expected outcome given their zero-use baseline.

Further analyses identified significant changes in the types of cannabis products favored by active users over time, with declines in the use of dried flower, concentrates, cannabis oil, tinctures, topical ointments, and hashish. In contrast, the consumption of edibles, liquids, and cannabis oil cartridges or disposable vapes increased. The shift away from combustibles is a positive development that may reduce the likelihood of developing pulmonary health issues.

These findings suggest that cannabis legalization may not lead to the adverse health effects that critics feared. In fact, it could promote safer consumption habits and minimize overall harm.

Canada’s experience did not result in a public health crisis. Misuse declined, safer products gained acceptance, and the situation remained stable. As US states continue to consider legalization, the takeaway is clear: the question isn’t whether to legalize—it’s how to do it smart.

Dominik Lett

While Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has rightfully drawn attention to some pretty silly and wasteful spending, it has overpromised and underdelivered on verifiable spending cuts. This should not be a surprise. Substantial deficit reduction by unilateral executive decree was never a realistic outcome, given that Congress holds the power of the purse. 

Nonetheless, the original mission of DOGE to downsize government and eliminate wasteful spending remains as relevant as ever. That’s precisely why Congress needs to take the reins and embrace big, bold spending cuts via reconciliation and presidentially initiated rescissions.

DOGE Will Not Close the Deficit and That’s Okay

Back in October, Elon Musk set the spending cut target at $2 trillion. That was quickly walked back to $1 trillion. Over the last few months, DOGE has had some modest successes, eliminating billions of dollars in government contracts and shrinking the federal workforce by about 12,000 personnel on net (closer to a 130,000 personnel cut in gross). At the same time, DOGE has suffered several major legal setbacks and self-imposed embarrassing blunders. The cumulative result? Elon lowered DOGE’s estimated savings again. This time down to $150 billion.

Unfortunately, even that $150 billion claim is optimistic. Itemized, verifiable cuts (those with receipts) sit at just $63 billion. Many of these receipts lack detail, contain errors, or otherwise have excessive savings claims that make the topline figure suspect. Per AEI’s Nat Malkus, accounting for clerical errors and inflated contract values roughly halves the claimed savings from contract elimination. The final tally of cuts could be slimmer when all is said and done.

By any clear-eyed account, Elon and DOGE are failing to meet their objective to deliver major spending cuts. Look no further than federal outlays, which today are about $135 billion higher than they were last year, ironically close to the amount DOGE claims to have saved. With high bond yields driving up the cost of borrowing further, deficits sailing past $2 trillion this year are a foregone conclusion.

Last month, some Republican legislators seemed to be under the impression that DOGE would do the hard work for them, partially leaning on hopeful DOGE savings to justify a discretionary spending deal that continued Biden-era spending levels. Americans and legislators must dispense with the notion that DOGE will fix the deficit.

All Roads Lead to Congress

Americans want spending cuts now. Recent Cato polling suggests that Americans believe that 59¢ of every $1 the federal government spends is wasteful. Moreover, Americans believe that spending cuts are pro-growth and preferable to tax increases for balancing the budget. Critically, Americans agree with the DOGE mission by overwhelming numbers. What they don’t agree with is how it has been handled.

DOGE has done Congress a massive favor. They have elevated the conversation over wasteful spending to a national level, albeit in a haphazard, sometimes error-prone manner. Now, Congress can finish what DOGE started, take leadership on budget policy, and deliver on substantive fiscal reform.

Conveniently, the House is planning on marking up reconciliation in the coming weeks, a fast-track process Republicans are using to enact Trump’s agenda. If you ask Americans, they believe the 2017 tax cut extension should be paired with spending cuts, not financed by adding to our already massive federal debt.

Congress should listen to its constituents. Restraining the growth in mandatory spending, including major entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare, can offset tax cuts, shrink the size of government, and slow a coming fiscal catastrophe. My Cato colleagues Adam Michel and Chris Edwards put together a list of low-hanging spending reforms legislators should consider.

Simultaneously, the Trump administration plans to send Congress a separate, very modest $9 billion rescissions package, proposing to cut funding for PBS, NPR, and foreign aid. As the graph below shows, a $9 billion cut is just 1 percent of all unspent, unobligated funds for FY2025. That’s hardly a major cut to discretionary spending.

Still, the rescissions package is a welcome change to a budget process in Washington that otherwise tends to continue the status quo (or actively make it worse). In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, presidents proposing to rescind funding was a more regular occurrence, and they saved taxpayers billions. Reevaluating priors and frequently trimming spending are both commonsense features of good budgeting.

Congress should add significantly to this rescission proposal. It is better to pass cuts through rescissions, which legislators can have a hand in crafting, than to have a freewheeling executive branch unlawfully impound Congressionally approved funds.

The Trump administration, too, should follow up this rescission package with additional spending cuts. Cutting low-priority spending should be a routine feature of the budget process, trimming as we go, rather than waiting for a fiscal catastrophe to force sudden austerity.

Congress has a narrow window to reassert control over the budget process and restore some measure of fiscal sanity. DOGE has lit the fuse by bringing attention to the bloated, mismanaged state of federal spending—but it’s ultimately up to Congress to carry the torch. That means embracing rescissions and using reconciliation as originally intended, a mechanism to reduce deficits. Anything less is complicity with a spiraling fiscal crisis, invariably slowing growth, adding to inflation, and raising interest rates.

The intent and spirit of DOGE were excellent, but it fell far short of its goals. DOGE was never going to close the deficit without Congress. To the extent that DOGE’s targets convinced the American people that much of federal spending is wasteful, thus prompting Congress to act, it could end up actually cutting spending, and that’s worth doing.