NEW, EXCLUSIVE: "Imagine Operation Warp Speed, But For Every Drug"

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The Trump administration plans to publish a proposed rule to end or significantly change the annual H-1B visa lottery.

This would be a very welcome development.

The H-1B program is a particularly frustrating part of the current immigration debate. While there certainly is a legitimate need by some companies to bring in select experts or key personnel from overseas, in practice, the H-1B system has become a farce, and has essentially been taken over and colonized by mainly-Indian outsourcing firm, and is being used by these firms and their clients to undercut American wages by replacing American workers with other workers who are decidedly not "superstars," just run-of-the-mill people willing to work for less money and less protection.

And, as we remember all-too-well from the Great Christmas X Freakout, the issue of H-1B is a rift within the Republican coalition, between the Tech Right and MAGA.

But it doesn't have to be. It's very easy to think of fixes and compromises that would solve the latter problem without making the former impossible.

According to reports, the Administration is contemplating publishing a new version of the rule it published in the final days of the first Trump Administration. Under that rule, USCIS was mandated to rank petitions based on the highest salary, as compared to salaries in the same area and for the same wage level.

This is a very obvious, common-sense fix: if companies need these visas to bring over "superstars," then, by definition, they will be happy to pay them superstar salaries to ensure they get those visas.

And also, by definition, the visa will no longer be able to be used to undercut the wages of American workers.

At the time the published rule was controversial, with many feeling that it went against statute. The end of the first Trump Administration rendered the issue moot.

It's unclear whether the new rule will be exactly the same as the new rule, but all reports indicate that it will be the same general idea. Presumably DHS and White House lawyers are hard at work on the language.

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Policy News You Need To Know

#TheEconomy #CapEx — Today the Federal Reserve Board put out new numbers showing that equipment production is up 17% on an annualized basis, the fastest rise in industrial investment since 1997. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hailed it as a "CapEx Comeback," crediting it specifically to tariffs and to the full expensing policies in the OBBBA. The latter is certainly a very welcome policy change. We think it's too early to say whether the former are or will drive additional investment, but it's certainly not impossible. And obviously some of that is a timing effect from companies that were waiting for passage of the bill to pull the trigger on some investments.

#RuleOfLaw — In many ways, the re-election of Donald J. Trump was a vote for the restoration of the rule of law in America. One of the most egregious cases of authoritarianism from the Biden-Harris Administration was the targeting of parents complaining to school boards about school closures and/or curricula by the FBI. New documents show that these events were not isolated incidents, but were deliberately decided from the top. Specifically, after Attorney General Merrick Garland's October 4, 2021, memorandum responding to a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA), the FBI’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Divisions created a special "threat tag" (EDUOFFICIALS) to track investigations and assessments of threats directed at school board officials. This led to dozens of investigations into parents, sometimes merely for expressing opposition to school policies like mask mandates or critical race theory, essentially labeling concerned parents as domestic terrorists. Newly released DOJ documents and emails have shown behind-the-scenes coordination between the Biden administration's DOJ and the White House seeking a "federal hook" to address complaints from the NSBA. These emails indicate the White House was involved in the process and aware of the NSBA’s letter that had called for using provisions like the Patriot Act to crack down on parents’ behavior at school board meetings. The punishments for this must be absolutely exemplary, not for "vengeance" but to change the incentive structure.

#RuleOfLaw — Speaking of, Paul Sperry, the excellent reporter at RealClearInvestigations, has a report out on the meetings in the Administration over the "floodgates" of documents they have unearthed concerning the infamous Russiagate hoax. Again, the punishments must be exemplary, not because of retribution, but because it is what is needed to ensure this never happens again.

#Crypto — SEC Chair Paul Atkins has declared that Ethereum, a very popular cryptocurrency, is not a security, which signals a significant regulatory shift. Designating cryptocurrencies as securities means they must abide by a very large laundry list of regulations.

#Energy #AmericanManufacturing — We'll see if this pans out, but Westinghouse has announced plans to build 10 large nuclear reactors in the US.

#America #ThinkTanks — Heritage President Kevin Roberts has announced that they will publish an "Index of Cultural Flourishing," an update to the "Index of Culture and Opportunity" that they published in 2014 and 2015. This is a good idea. We need more, more complex and nuanced, measures of societal well-being than income and GDP, as important as those may be.

#Immigration — Important discussion of one of those realities of American life that everyone sees but is impolitic to talk about: At the Federalist, Breccan F. Thies writs about how ICE is helping to alleviate pressure on America's emergency rooms.

#AI #AmericanManufacturing — Remember the much-ballyhooed $500 billion data center project announced by President Trump, Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI? The Journal has a reported piece by Eliot Brown and Berber Jin alleging that the project is "struggling to get off the ground."

#Econ101 — Most shocking study of the year, from Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards at Jonathan Meer. Are you sitting down? California's fast food minimum wage hike reduced employment. The economics profession may never recover.

#DEI — President Trump has decided to pull the US out of Unesco over its "DEI policies" and "pro-Palestinian and pro-China tilt." In general, our view is that the best way for the US, which is a major funder of these institutions, to deal with that kind of rot is through vigorous exercise of influence. But this is a second-best option.