NEW EPISODE OF THE SPHERE PODCAST:

This episode is a bit unusual, as it's a debate. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, debates economist Noah Smith, author of the "Noahpinion" Substack, about mass immigration, and specifically mass deportations: why is it a good idea or not, how far it should be taken, and more. It's a fun and engaging discussion.

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Avenge Big Balls, Federalize DC

As you probably know by now, Edward Coristine, famous as "Big Balls," one of the brilliant young DOGE employees, was violently assaulted in DC. It happened near Logan Circle. Apparently, a group of a dozen "youths" tried to attack a woman and steal her car, and Big Balls, definitely earning his nickname, intervened. The group severely beat him until police intervened.

This is just awful. You all know the catastrophic situation of public safety in DC.

The first and obvious takeaway is that the DOGE kids really are and were amazing people. We have criticized DOGE like many others, but it was still a very worthwhile endeavor done by very good people. Big Balls is a hero, and he should be even more nationally famous after this. He should never buy another drink in his life. He should receive a medal at a big ceremony at the White House.

The second takeaway is that it is shocking and humiliating that the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth is, at times, a jungle.

The answer is obvious: to avenge Big Balls, we must Federalize DC and restore order.

In theory, DC has home rule per an act of Congress and it requires an act of Congress to reverse it. That law will probably not be forthcoming, even though there is already a push to change it, and it should be supported.

But there are other, more creative means.

We suggest three.

Firstly, the DC National Guard, unlike state national guards, is under the direct control of the President. The President should use the National Guard to supplement and de facto replace local law enforcement.

Secondly, the President might invoke the Insurrection Act, and deploys military forces to perform law enforcement functions. Under the Act, federal military commanders can supersede local authority and issue orders to local populations, effectively subordinating local law enforcement to federal command structure. The problem with this idea is that the legal authority for invoking the Insurrection Act are somewhat narrow. Under 10 U.S.C. § 252, "Whenever the President considers" that "unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings" he can use military forces to enforce the law. There are two ways to read this statute. If one reads the second part, one sees that ordinary street-level crime does not fall under the kinds of "assemblages or rebellion" that the authors of the statute intended (though it could very well be argued that any form of rampant crime is a form of "rebellion against the authority of the United States"). However, if one reads the first part, it seems like the law grants the President a discretionary authority to invoke the provision; what matters is not whether there are "obstructions, combinations, or assemblages" but whether the President "considers" that there are. (It's also worth noting that the term "combinations" covers things like conspiracies—no doubt, the Founding-era authors of the law had read Cicero's Catilinarian Orations.) This is why courts have traditionally given extreme deference to presidential determinations. However, we do not live in traditional times, and DOJ guidance on the Insurrection Act is based on a "last resort" doctrine. Invoking the Insurrection Act would surely create a judicial nightmare and might lead to its being narrowed when such authorities should be left unhindered for times when they are most needed.

There is a third option which we find most appealing: the White House could appoint MPD officers as special deputy US Marshals. While we haven't been able to find a statute explicitly authorizing special deputy appointments, they are a longstanding practice, dating back to 1789, and which is frequently used for major events like presidential inaugurations. The power draws from the Marshals' traditional common law posse comitatus powers. 28 U.S. Code § 564 grants Marshals "the same powers which a sheriff of the State may exercise in executing the laws thereof," which (as anyone who has watched a Western knows) includes the power to deputize citizens. In practice, the Attorney General, acting on presidential direction, would instruct the Director of the U.S. Marshals Service to deputize officers of the MPD, thereby putting them under his authority.

Of course, law enforcement isn't the only thing. Once law enforcement has been put under the control of the White House, there should be an attempt to make the Mayor and City Council agree to placing the city under Federal control. We're sure the White House can think of creative ways of getting them to see the rightness of this.

Finally, there's the other very important lever: while the DC Council raises revenue through local taxes, its budget must be approved by Congress through an appropriations act. The President should state that he would veto any act approving the DC Council budget until either the Council agrees to Federal control, or Congress ends home rule.

This would be a great opportunity to make the capital of the most awesome country on Earth the grandest city on Earth. On top of Singapore levels of law enforcement, there could be great public works, and great cultural events celebrating America and especially American history and culture (which we bet the uber-liberal population of DC would love).

And it would mean Big Balls did not suffer in vain.

Policy News You Need To Know

#MAHA #mRNA #Progress #Science — Ever since the appointment of RFK, Jr. at HHS, we have sought to give him the maximum benefit of the doubt. We have consistently said that the current prevailing medical and scientific consensus is so weak and so riddled with errors that having a disruptor, even one with some potentially crankish views, in his role, could be a very healthy (pun intended) thing for medicine. However, this latest move is one that we cannot even begin to defend. Yesterday, RFK, Jr. announced that HHS will terminate 22 mRNA vaccine development contracts worth approximately $500 million. HHS claims that "data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu," although they did not share the data they based this assessment on. The argument is that "a single mutation can make mRNA vaccines ineffective" because mRNA vaccines target only a small part of viral proteins. This is true, but simultaneously hilariously backward. Because new mRNA vaccines can be designed and manufactured literally overnight, as soon as you have the gene sequence for the new mutation, you can produce new vaccines as fast as the virus mutates. This is a big part of why mRNA is such a wonderful technology. The only reason this wasn't done during the Covid-19 pandemic was because the FDA refused to approve new vaccines to tackle new variants. The correct response to this problem is to speed up mRNA vaccine approval, not stop producing mRNA vaccines. Now, to clarify: HHS is explicitly stating that this policy only affects mRNA vaccines for respiratory illness, and that all other mRNA research is safe. This is particularly welcome because a highly promising area for mRNA technology is cancer treatment. Of course, the path of research is hard to predict and it's possible that shutting down this kind of research could prevent us from making discoveries in other areas; we will probably never know. Regardless, this seems like a decision motivated purely by ideology and to win points with the antivax crowd (which is loud but actually small). The justification for it is baffling—again: it's precisely because respiratory illnesses mutate so much that mRNA vaccines are such an exciting avenue. While we understand concerns about vax-mania, it's nevertheless true that many Americans, particularly the elderly, are very vulnerable to influenza and other respiratory illnesses, and precisely because influenza mutates every year, the vaccine is only partly effective. Fast-turnaround mRNA influenza vaccines targeted specifically at the vulnerable elderly population could save many lives. This is truly dispiriting.

#MAHA — Speaking of: this misstep is all the more frustrating given that the MAHA concept and movement have so much real potential. A new study published in the journal Nature Medicine, highlighted by The New York Times, the largest and longest clinical trial yet to examine the effects of ultraprocessed foods on weight, showed that people lose more weight when they avoid ultraprocessed foods, even when those foods were nutritionally similar to minimally processed alternatives. The study, which was a randomized controlled trial, showed that participants who ate ultraprocessed foods had more food cravings and found they had less control over those cravings. This certainly sounds right. It's very likely that ultraprocessed foods are a "superstimulus," a concept pioneered by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Nikolaas Tinbergen, which refers to an exaggerated version of a natural stimulus that elicits a much stronger response than the original stimulus for which an organism's response evolved; superstimuli can hijack our evolved reward systems, leading to behaviors and pathologies which our biology leaves us undefended against. Unlike mRNA vaccines, ultraprocessed foods are a real, not imagined, public health disaster.

#Tariffs #Trade — President Trump just signed an EO imposing an additional 25% tariff on India "in response to its continued purchase of Russian oil."

#AI — OpenAI has just released two "open-weight" models. There are two components to an AI model: the model itself, which is like the formula that produces the output, and the "weights", which is the data that is used by the formula to produce that output. While the model defines how information flows and is processed, like a blueprint, the LLM weights are like the content of that blueprint, learned from vast amounts of data and ultimately determining how the model responds to specific inputs. The weights are by far the most valuable part of the model. When you are told that AI companies need massive data centers consuming enormous amounts of energy to "train" their models, what that means in practice is that they are producing the weights. For the biggest models, which might contain up to 1 trillion or more parameters, the weights could represent 2 to 4 terabytes or more of data, although some advanced models have lighter weights, such as 700 gigabytes for OpenAI's GPT-3—a lot of data, but potentially storable on, say, a modern home computer. Anyhow, while AI companies have frequently "open sourced" their models they have tended to jealously guard their weights. So OpenAI's move is significant. Open weights could dramatically accelerate research by allowing researchers worldwide to experiment without needing massive computational resources to train their models. This could lead to rapid innovation in fine-tuning techniques, specialized applications, and novel architectures. This would also mean that if open weights become the standard, whoever has the most used open weight would become the de facto industry standard, which would have numerous downstream business benefits (which is presumably what OpenAI wants). This could also help further specifically American leadership in AI, since if OpenAI (or other American companies') open weights become the de facto standard, American AI companies that have the expertise, infrastructure, and next-generation development will be advantaged, and other nations will become dependent on American AI foundations, similar to how American internet protocols have dominated despite being "open," giving America de facto leadership over the internet and its economy. Why are we going on about this? Because, as OSTP Director Michael Kratsios snarkily (but justifiably) pointed out on X, last year the Biden Administration seriously contemplated banning open weights. But now, "our companies are leading."

#Energy #GreenNewScam — People can argue about all sorts of energy sources, in particular solar, but if there is one that is just objectively bad, it is wind. It is enormously expensive and intermittent, and is actually bad for the environment. Not to mention ugly. Which is why we're gratified that President Trump feels the same and that the Admin "is canceling what would have been one of the largest land-based wind farms in the United States," as Alec Schemmel of Fox News Digital is reporting. The Lava Ridge Wind Project was rush-approved in the waning days of the Biden-Harris administration, in December 2024. As Schemmel writes, "following a review of the project by the Trump administration, officials at the Interior Department claimed to find 'crucial legal deficiencies' with Biden's approval of the project, including certain statutorily binding criteria that were ignored." Presumably there will be a lawsuit, and we will see whether the Trump administration lawyers have got the goods. Still, very good move, if only as a signal to the industry.

#FamilyPolicy — At The Federalist, reporter-turned-full-time-Mom vented her spleen, very justifiably, about a recent Journal profile on "high-achieving conservative women — including a Palantir executive, a senior White House official, and Republican legislators — who are 'having it all.'" She points out that, most of the time, women cannot, in fact, have it all. The women who can, in fact, have it all, are usually found in the very rarefied milieus at the top of society, and when they present themselves as an example to the rest of the planet, they tend to skip over the fact that the "it" of "having it all" includes an army of nannies and other service staff to make it all work, or that their exciting C-suite occupations are not within the reach of most American women (if only because they're not within the reach of most American people, period) and that most American women do not, in fact, aspire to the brass ring and the corner office. This is an important debate with policy implications: as Republicans try to figure out what, if anything, they want to do about family policy, they should think about this. During this first term, President Trump celebrated record-high percentages of female labor force participation; seemingly, it occurred neither to he nor to anyone on his staff that it might not be something to celebrate. As Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies and journalist Maria Baer ruefully pointed out recently, the OBBBA was very light on family policy, except for an increase of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, a program which explicitly excludes married couples where one spouse is a stay-at-home parent; as they noted, "the majority of American families with children don’t currently use paid child care, and those who do are disproportionally among the wealthiest." Many Republican officeholders and cadres seem to be promoting the two-full-time-earner model of family simply by default, simply because it is the one they see in the world, and also perhaps because it is more friendly to business, but it is not the "default" model, it is one that has been promoted by liberals, and it is, at least arguably, one that does not resonate with most GOP voters.

#FamilyPolicy — Speaking of, here's EPPC Fellow Patrick T. Brown asking a very sensible question: America is preparing to host the World Cup next year. "Will families be part of the festivities?"

#DEI #HigherEd — Important news: as Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow John Sailer points out, the DOJ released a memo (PDF) including guidance for federal funding recipients, clarifying how nondiscrimination law should be applied. This is particularly bad news for universities. The memo explicitly calls out DEI policies as potentially unlawful under antidiscrimination laws like Title VI and Title IX, and more importantly, specifically targets the use of racial proxies, which has been the time-honored ways for universities to get around nondiscrimination laws, such as "cultural competence" or "diversity statements". The memo goes into quite a bit of detail, calling out universities' discriminatory practices, such as hiring on the basis of "equity" or having "diverse slate" policies (a policy whereby applicant slates for a certain positions include a minimum number of candidates from certain racial groups). This is very good work, and very important. Universities always try to weasel out of antidiscrimination law enforcement through these kinds of procedural or lexicographical tricks, so it's very important that the DOJ goes into this level of specifics to show that they won't be fooled.

#HigherEd — Speaking of: your hilarious poll of the day. According to a poll of Harvard faculty conducted by the Crimson, while 21% of faculty say there is “systemic antisemitism” on campus, 46% say there is “systemic anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and/or anti-Palestinian bias.” Burn. It. Down.

#BigTech #Chyna — Senator Tom Cotton has published a very interesting letter, addressed to the chairman of the board of Intel, raising concerns about its CEO, Lip-Bu Tan. Apparently, Tan has either control over or investments in many Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms, many with ties to the Chinese PLA. Cotton also raises integrity issues stemming from Tan's tenure as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, during which the company pleaded guilty to illegally selling products to a Chinese military university and transferring technology to an associated Chinese semiconductor company without licenses. Senator Cotton points out that Intel is part of the Secure Enclave program, the DOD program that aims to establish a secure, domestic supply chain for advanced microelectronics and semiconductors specifically tailored for national security and military applications. It's worth noting that Senator Cotton sits on the Intel Committee, so he may know even more than he lets on. Hopefully Intel executives have very good answers to Senator Cotton's questions, and they can give them while under oath in front of Congress!