The FCC's newly adopted 2026 Section 706 report confirms it: the broadband marketplace is working. Speeds are climbing, prices are falling, and competition is expanding into corners of the country once written off as unreachable.

Ninety-seven percent of Americans have fixed broadband access; mobile 5G reaches almost 95% of homes; more than three-quarters of American households can choose among three or more fixed providers. Cable operators have driven much of this with fiber and gigabit builds, competitive mobile offerings, and lower wireless prices for everyone. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show wireless prices have fallen nearly 30% since 2010.

Ninety percent of cable mobile data traffic now runs over Wi-Fi, made possible by the FCC's decision to open the full 1,200 megahertz in the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use — a move that has driven more than $870 billion in economic value in 2023 and 2024 alone 

During the Biden administration, Congress created and funded the BEAD program, a $42 billion effort to connect the roughly three percent of Americans the market hadn’t yet reached. But closing that gap takes more than money and willing providers; it takes lots and lots of permits from governments at every level.

A new report from the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute (ACLP), following its earlier study on utility poles, lays out the problem. Across 6,933 terrestrial BEAD projects, ACLP identified 86,402 distinct permits needed before construction can begin — more than half of projects need more than 10 permits, one in seven requires more than 20.

Every project involves county-level permitting. Beyond that, 95% require federal environmental review, 76% state permits, 71% private or third-party agreements, and 62% municipal sign-off. The typical build faces eight permitting authorities, each capable of stalling it. Projects overlap 2,449 counties and 12,146 municipalities, a nationwide patchwork. Wetlands and floodplains touch the most projects; nearly 5,000 cross roads and highways, and 3,000-plus hit railroad crossings, plus transmission lines and pipeline corridors.

These slowdowns are fixable, starting with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). With roughly $21 billion in remaining BEAD non-deployment funding, NTIA can allow states to redirect some toward permitting: municipalities hiring reviewers or outsourcing processing, states investing in digital tracking tools, for this round and beyond. That authority already exists, so let’s use it.

Congress has a role, too. The agencies providers most often encounter — USDA, Interior, Defense, the Forest Service, the Army Corps, and DOT — need clearer authority and coordination tools. Congress should also end forcing providers to absorb relocation costs whenever a federally funded project requires moving existing facilities.

Permitting is now the single biggest threat to BEAD delivering on its promise on any reasonable timeline. 

NTIA has tools it can use today; Congress has a clear set of fixes it can enact. What's needed now is the will to move quickly, so families and small businesses BEAD was built for aren't left waiting years longer than necessary.

September 4, 2026

The Honorable Howard Lutnick
Secretary of Commerce
1401 Constitution Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20230

Dear Secretary Lutnick:

We conservative leaders commend and thank you for your leadership and support of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to improve the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) practices for instituting inter partes review (IPR) challenges (Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025).

We recognize that this much-needed rule would not have been proposed or shepherded through the rulemaking process if you thought it was not reasonable and necessary. Nor would this proposal be as substantively meaningful in bringing fairness, efficiency, and predictability to patent validity adjudication at PTAB, had you not greenlighted this initiative. Thank you and USPTO Director Squires for pursuing this long overdue administrative reform. This gives you a golden opportunity to enact a significant new policy through administrative action instead of waiting on Congress.

As you know, Congress, in the America Invents Act (AIA), intended IPRs to be a faster, cheaper alternative to district court patent litigation. That promise has not been kept.

Instead, PTAB provides mammoth incumbent corporations, their allies, and foreign national champions a second front to attack valuable patents until they wear them down or invalidate them through years of serial and duplicative challenges, facing challenger-friendly rules in PTAB patent validity cases. More than half of IPR petitions are repeat challenges, while more than 80 percent of IPRs duplicate ongoing litigation. Thus, multiple PTAB challenges perpetuate uncertainty, deny patent owners quiet title, and impose extra costs that reduce the inventor’s investment in R&D for commercialization.

USPTO’s proposal delivers the “one bite at the apple” Congress said it was making law. Under the rule, petitioners will have to stipulate they will not pursue overlapping §102 or §103 invalidity arguments and will refrain from seeking PTAB review when judicial or administrative adjudication has held that the claims in question are valid. The rule gives meaning to USPTO’s existing authority to consider the effects of its regulations on “the economy and the integrity of the patent system.”

Director Squires testified last fall to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property about how reliable patent protection fuels America’s economy and national security. The proposed rule’s finality and predictability will help secure the unique intellectual property foundation of U.S. leadership in critical and emerging technologies.

USPTO has invested significant resources in producing and shepherding PTO-P-2025-0025 to this point. It has been nearly nine months since the NPRM’s public comment period in which many of us participated. The final rule is now at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We applaud the foresight of beginning this rulemaking early in the second Trump administration. Now, what is needed is doing all that can be done to ensure that OMB issues this final rule. We respectfully ask you to urge OMB to issue this rule.

Our requesting your direct involvement is grounded in the outcome of a similar USPTO NPRM in the final year of the first Trump administration. In short, USPTO proposed a rule to deny institution of PTAB reviews in similar circumstances to the present proposal—repeated bites at the apple when a challenge is duplicative, superfluous of present litigation, against already adjudicated patents, or has adverse effect on the economy or patent system integrity. OMB ended up not issuing that rule because opponents piled on and cowed OMB. Well, the same interests are back, heavily outnumbering propatent groups meeting with OMB in the final, make-or-break stage of this process, and aiming for the same outcome.

We strongly support this reform-minded NPRM because it advances fairness, due process, and predictability. We deeply appreciate your and USPTO’s leadership on this proinnovation, proeconomic growth rule. We ask you to weigh in at this juncture and help get this crucially important rule across the goal line, which would be your legacy.

Respectfully,

cc: USPTO Director John Squires

*Some organization names appear only for identification purposes.

Elected officials right and left are cowering in face of news stories and angry town halls in opposition to data center construction. Even Texas, which has never met an economic development project it didn’t want, has paused approvals for new data centers at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott.

A few stories, however, are about those projects lucky enough to have been completed before the furor erupted, and those lucky enough to be benefiting from them. For these fortunate few, a flood of new government revenue is offsetting property taxes, huge bonuses have been paid to teachers, and long-moribund communities are seeing new construction, revitalization and long desired growth.

But it won’t last forever. At some point, maybe sooner than you think, all that sweet, sweet data center investment will begin to dwindle, and some will have missed out.

The thing about buildouts, once they’re built out, they’re built out. Once the gold rush is over, it’s over. Or at least dwindles to a trickle. And no one seems to be taking that into consideration about data centers.

We tend to think trends will continue indefinitely, but they almost never do. Booms rise, crest, and then dwindle. There is every reason to think that the huge rush to build massive data centers will end at some point, and maybe sooner than you think. At least two reasons, in fact.

First, innovation in the AI space is happening at a breathtaking pace. The AI companies will find ways to design more compact models, and to train and run their models more efficiently. In fact, pretty soon AI will be redesigning itself to be faster, leaner and more efficient. One result may be less need for ever more and ever larger data centers.

And second, eventually Wall Street will get stingier with the money. Investors are already starting to ask harder questions about the return on all this investment and the billions they are putting at risk. How many data centers does a company need? How many AI companies are viable? As capital markets lose confidence in the return on investment, financing will tighten, and the data center buildout will slow accordingly. Some of these companies may consolidate, shrink, or disappear altogether. Anybody want a slightly used data center for 10 cents on the dollar?

Here’s the point: Put up barriers to data center development, and you might just miss out. And that would be unfortunate.

Data centers are terrific assets to a community or region. Compared with almost any other major commercial or industrial facility, data centers are clean, quiet, create high-paying jobs, generate little ongoing traffic and throw off considerable property taxes. They’re actually good neighbors.

But this pace of construction won’t last forever. Eventually the buildout will crest, capital will become more selective, technology will become more efficient, and the gold rush will dwindle. And if you missed out, you missed out, and you’ll probably regret it.

Texas has a housing problem because Texas has a growth problem — and as problems go, that’s not a bad one.

People and businesses continue moving here because Texas is hospitable. We purposely create and maintain conditions that welcome families, workers, businesses, and investors. 

But population growth creates demand for housing, and supply must keep pace.

Concerns about housing have not been limited to Texas, however, and this led to a debate in Congress over what the federal government could do to encourage more housing construction and availability.

Part of that debate was about institutional ownership of single-family homes, a moral panic that was based more on anecdote than on substance. Texas lawmakers who campaigned on stopping large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes demanded federal action, and they got it. The bill passed Congress and became law July 11.

So, when the Texas Legislature returns to session in January, state lawmakers should look beyond re-litigating institutional homeownership and focus on changes at the state and local level that will truly make housing more available and affordable.

Further restricting private capital in the housing market could create two problems. It could unnecessarily duplicate federal law, adding more layers of compliance, uncertainty and legal risk for builders and investors. If the state goes further than Congress did, it could complicate a carefully negotiated federal compromise with a contradictory state law.

Texas has built its economic model in part on encouraging investment and being less hostile to capital than competing states. The result has been obvious. But capital is mobile and impatient. If Texas imposes additional and possibly more restrictive layers of regulation on single-family rental investment, that money will go somewhere else.

That would particularly damage the build-to-rent market, which is about financing and constructing new housing, not about buying up existing homes. Adding regulatory friction to housing construction would discourage building.

The provisions in the federal legislation for build-to-rent and renovate-to-rent activity were careful compromises that reflected economic analysis and industry input. Buying an existing home and converting it to a rental is very different from financing an entirely new neighborhood of rental homes.

A new law written during Texas’s compressed legislative session could easily blur that distinction. In trying to one-up the federal government, lawmakers could end up discouraging precisely the kind of investment Texas needs most.

Besides, institutional investors are not the principal cause of Texas’s housing-affordability problem. Their share of the national single-family rental market remains in the low single digits. In Texas, it’s less than 1%. The real problems are less dramatic but more difficult.

Raising the cost of materials through tariffs didn’t help, but most other factors related to housing costs are state and local. Permitting delays slow construction. Local land-use restrictions limit what can be built where. High property taxes affect nearly every homeowner and renter, not just the tiny portion of the market touched by institutional buyers.

These are issues state and local lawmakers can actually do something about.

Institutional investors are a useful caricature to scapegoat. It is easier to blame rich, impersonal fat cats than to do the hard work of fixing permitting systems, restraining property taxes, and loosening zoning and land-use restrictions. And Congress has already dealt with the investor question.

Texas lawmakers raised a legitimate concern, and surprisingly, the federal government acted. Now it is time to move on to the parts of the housing crisis federal law cannot address.

Too often, Texas lawmakers spend their limited legislative time passing useless bills designed to appease voters or defy Washington without regard to solving actual problems.

If Texas legislators really want to make housing more affordable and more abundant, they should focus on permitting reform, local zoning and land-use restriction, property taxes and property insurance. Because that’s where the real potential for improvement lies.

Republican administrations going back to George W. Bush have asserted the “unitary executive” theory—the idea that the Constitution places the entire executive branch under the authority of one elected president.

That means the president must be able to entirely control the executive branch, direct executive-branch officials and, generally, remove those who refuse to carry out his policies, including officers whose appointments required Senate confirmation.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court has now mostly affirmed that theory. The court struck down the law that allowed Federal Trade Commission commissioners to be removed only for cause, concluding that officials exercising executive power must ultimately remain accountable to the president. That is almost certainly the correct constitutional decision.

But Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the decision with a warning.

For nearly a century, Congress has built a gigantic administrative state on the assumption that many federal agencies were “independent” of presidential control. Congress has delegated to these agencies powers that look remarkably like legislation, allowing bureaucrats to write rules governing private conduct. It has also given agencies judicial-like powers, allowing them to investigate, prosecute and adjudicate cases within their own bureaucracies.

All of that was questionable enough when these agencies were supposedly “independent.”

Now the Court has concluded that the president controls them.

As Gorsuch put it, the so-called fourth branch of government may no longer be independent, but its enormous powers have not disappeared. They have simply been reassigned to the president.

That is Gorsuch’s warning.

It would have been one thing had Congress created these agencies from the beginning with the understanding that all their accumulated power would be controlled by one person. Congress might have delegated less. It might have written narrower laws. It might have retained more responsibility for making policy itself.

Instead, Congress spent decades transferring legislative and judicial powers to supposedly independent agencies. That was a violation of the nondelegation doctrine, but that’s another topic. Now, after the administrative state has accrued enormous powers, the court has given the president total control.

The constitutional answer is not to deny that the president controls the executive branch. The answer must be for Congress to reclaim the powers it should never have delegated.

And that is the frightening part: Congress isn’t doing much of anything these days.

If you pay attention to politics, you’ve been hearing about the SAVE America Act for nearly all of 2026. President Trump includes it in almost every public comment and has held other legislation hostage to Congress passing the SAVE America Act.

Many elected Republicans and social media jockeys have insisted that without the SAVE America Act, our elections are corrupt and the republic is doomed.

Which is odd, since we just celebrated 250 years of the American republic without the SAVE America Act.

If it’s so vital, why can’t Congress pass it?

Maybe we should take a look and see what’s actually in the bill.

The SAVE America Act puts conditions on “federal elections” conducted by the states. Remember, no elections are administered by the federal government. Elections are run by governments below the federal level: states, counties, cities and various kinds of districts.

A “federal election” in this case involves candidates for federal office. So only if president, senator or House seat is on the ballot.

The SAVE America Act amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to prohibit states from processing voter registration applications without documentation of citizenship, such as a U.S. passport, a REAL ID-compliant driver's license indicating citizenship, or a birth certificate paired with a government-issued photo ID. It thus eliminates online and mail-in voter registration for most applicants by requiring them to present these documents in person to an election official.

It imposes strict photo ID requirements for both in-person and absentee voting, excluding common forms of identification like student IDs or non-enhanced driver's licenses that do not explicitly state citizenship.

That would pass Congress by 80 percent. But that’s not all that’s in the bill.

It mandates that states remove non-citizens from voter rolls based on data matches with federal agencies and requires states to share unredacted voter registration lists with the Department of Homeland Security. So, states must let the federal government access, inspect, review, and edit state voter registration lists.

This is probably a constitutional violation. And while a few states have already voluntarily done this, it revealed nothing statistically insignificant.

It creates a private right of action allowing lawsuits against election officials who register voters without proper documentation and establishes criminal penalties for violations.

An exciting new field for trial lawyers. And serious criminal liability for a clerical job.

It effectively ends online and mail-in voter registration for federal elections, as these methods cannot satisfy the in-person document inspection requirement. Millions of citizens who update their registration via mail or online (e.g., after moving or changing a name) will be forced to visit election offices physically.

This would inconvenience millions of Americans over something that is mostly a non-issue.

Because the bill mandates that documentary proof of citizenship be presented in person to an election official, it effectively eliminates voter registration drives conducted by third-party groups.

So, no more voter registration drives at church.

Now that you know what is really in the SAVE America Act, does it strike you as more important than anything else Congress could possibly be doing? It is worth ending the filibuster over?

Or is it possible that this is mostly an unnecessary intrusion on federalism designed to satisfy a president’s private obsession?

You might support every one of these provisions.

But hopefully now you can also understand why some thoughtful people might not.

You probably know that confirmation of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been held up by a handful of Republican senators, most notably Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), but also others.

And you’ve probably heard that this hold was simply a temper tantrum—a way of getting back at President Trump for ending their Senate careers. Well, that’s one narrative, and it’s probably sufficient if you’re an unquestioning defender of the president.

But let’s look at what has caused so much consternation.

The agreement between the Department of Justice and Trump settled several Trump-initiated lawsuits and claims.

• Earlier in 2026, President Trump sued the IRS and the Treasury Dept. over the leaking of his tax records by an IRS contractor in 2019, for which Trump sought $10 billion.

• Trump had also previously sued the federal government for $230 million over the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search for classified documents, and over the Russia collusion investigation from his first term.

The settlement involved Trump dismissing these lawsuits and claims in exchange for:

• A formal apology;

• Sweeping immunity from tax examinations and audits involving Trump, his family, affiliated individuals, trusts, and businesses; and

• An “anti-weaponization fund” of $1.776 billion, to provide relief for those claiming to have been targeted by federal “lawfare” or “weaponization” by the Department of Justice. Trump’s attorney general would administer the fund, and claims would be considered by a five-person panel he appointed, though the president could remove any or all members of the panel without cause.

Reasonable people can disagree over whether President Trump is owed an apology for the Mar-a-Lago document raid (probably no) and the Russia collusion investigation (probably yes). The potential for the anti-weaponization fund to be used as a slush fund to reward Trump loyalists should be obvious. But given the many dicey business ventures and investments made by Trump and his circle since his re-election, it should be easy to understand why immunity from IRS scrutiny should be unacceptable.

But there’s a bigger problem. How can it possibly be ethical for a president to sue an agency he completely controls, and negotiate a settlement with an attorney general he appointed? That’s not a negotiation between adversarial parties—that’s a sweetheart deal—especially since Trump was not going to win any of those lawsuits or claims on their merits.

What stops Trump from suing his own administration again, anytime he feels the need for another couple $billion? And then settling with his appointed attorney general, who he can fire if there is any lack of fealty?

As of this writing, a deal has supposedly been worked out that will allow the holdout senators to confirm Blanche as AG. But in this administration, things change on a dime. If the anti-weaponization fund has been killed, that’s great, but giving Trump and everyone he knows immunity from IRS audits and penalties remains an area of legitimate concern.

Hence the concerns about Blanche. If he would sign off on such a one-sided, sweetheart deal for the president before confirmation, what will he agree to after confirmation?

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, always charming in his social media posts from his farm, from the Iowa State Fair, and other impossibly typical Midwestern scenes, recently posted that Iowans keep asking him why Republicans and Democrats don’t work together.

Grassley’s response was about how he was just named the most bipartisan Republican senator and one of the top five bridge-building U.S. senators. Well, good.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I adore Sen. Grassley. He’s a walking argument against both term limits and age limits in the Senate, and other than protecting ethanol subsidies for Iowa farmers, has a pretty consistent conservative voting record. But allow me to add a more accurate and more pointed response to the question Grassley says he keeps getting asked.

The reason Republicans and Democrats don’t work together to solve problems, as they are supposed to, is that their voters won’t let them.

Yes, really.

In today’s politics, even a photo of a Republican talking to a Democrat causes a social media flood of condemnations and threats of a primary challenge. Much less trying to negotiate an actual solution to a problem.

Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford is still smarting from his experience in 2024. Lankford was tasked by Republican leadership to craft a compromise with Democrats to address the border crisis and to legislate tougher new immigration and asylum laws. But a backlash led to his being abandoned and hung out to dry by his colleagues. Similarly, while currently flourishing as Secretary of State in the Trump administration, Marco Rubio will never be forgiven by some Republicans for his efforts from 2013 to 2017 to craft a bipartisan immigration solution.

Who wins elections? Candidates who promise to “fight,” not who pledge to work across the aisle. Dare you attempt to work with the other party on entitlement reform, immigration, spending restraint, or any other of our pressing problems, and you will be immediately demonized by grassroots voters (primary voters) as a traitor, and you’ll be primaried by someone who promises to never even breathe the same disgusting air that the other party breathes.

Here’s the problem: That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

The American experiment tests whether people who see the world differently can find ways to live together in peace without needing an external authority to rule over them. Doing so means finding consensus, and that’s what is meant by “self-government.” The alternative to self-government is either submission to a ruler, or endless conflict.

Consensus is determined through negotiation and compromise. That’s how you get people who disagree to come to terms. If consensus is achieved, the fruit of that work becomes embodied in legislation. That’s how all of this is supposed to work.

Why can’t Republicans and Democrats work together to solve problems? If you want your representatives to fight for you and destroy those who disagree with you, I’m sorry, but consider the possibility that you’re the problem.

All businesses consume resources. Some more than others.

Heavy manufacturing, something many voters say they want to return to these shores, consumes enormous quantities of energy and raw materials. Same with semiconductor fabs—they consumer enormous quantities of water and electricity. The federal government is actively encouraging construction of semiconductor fabs and manufacturing in the U.S.

Refineries, something the public says we need more of, take up enormous space, make a lot of noise, fill the night sky with bright light, and use a lot of water and electricity. Yet the public says they want them here.

The romantic attachment so many seem to have for old-economy heavy industry with its pollution and hazards to workers clearly doesn’t extend to the 21st-century modern data economy, as physically represented in data centers, which are cleaner, safer, quieter and less demanding on the environment.

All that fun stuff you do online? All your eBaying, Amazoning, Etsying, Facebooking, Xing, emailing, texting, Instagramming, Netflixing, Googling and storing thousands of unnecessary photos? That’s where it all happens. Where did you think it happened?

Data centers, like all businesses, pay for their inputs. They pay for the resources they consume. Because businesses pay for their inputs, they have an incentive to be as efficient as possible. Waste is money lost. So data centers have every incentive to conserve water, to conserve electricity, to operate efficiently—because they have to pay for their inputs.

Data centers don’t sneak out at night and steal electricity from the grid. They buy it. They don’t show up at municipal reservoirs with siphons and buckets. They pay for the water they use.

In fact, data centers are the “killer app” for investment in additional electrical generation, transmission, storage, cooling technologies and water efficiency. As such, data centers literally make the grid more reliable, while using less water than golf courses, car washes, steel mills, refineries, and chip fabs.

Bashing data centers makes no sense. It’s just the latest bit of hysteria, and policymakers are supposed to see through the hysteria, not cravenly cave in to it. It’s the anti-fracking playbook, recycled.

But a quick aside to the AI companies, whose data centers we are here defending:

Remember how we’ve stressed that data centers pay for their inputs? Well, one of the inputs to AI is written, spoken, recorded and filmed content. Much of which is protected by copyright.

Those works are inputs too.

If an AI company has to pay for electricity, land, water, chips and engineers, why would anyone think the creative works used to train its models should be free?

AI shouldn’t get its training materials free any more than it should get its water or electricity for free. That’s not unnecessary friction—it’s paying for your inputs.

We’re bullish on data centers and bullish on artificial intelligence. Both will generate enormous economic value and innovation.

But innovation doesn’t grant special dispensation to conscript the property of others. You don’t get to eminent domain someone’s intellectual property.

Data centers pay for their electricity. They pay for their water. And AI should pay for its content inputs, too.

This morning, the Supreme Court issued its long-anticipated opinion on birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, docket no. 25-365. The Court held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, and also struck down President Trump’s Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”

We expected the Court to strike down the executive order for any number of reasons, especially since the lower courts had uniformly rejected the president’s position, and we were surprised that some commentators thought otherwise.

There are two parts to this fascinating decision.

On overturning the executive order, we think the Court’s majority of six got it right. Just as the authors of the 14th Amendment in no way thought birth tourism would be included in their birthright citizenship provision, in no way did the Framers of the Constitution think that a president had the power to sweep away federal statutes and judicial precedents with the stroke of a pen. In our system, presidents may indeed enjoy the powers of a unitary executive branch, but those powers are still constrained within the four walls of the Constitution.

. . .

We generally agree with Sarah Isgur’s observation that it is oversimplistic to view this Court as a simple 6-3 conservative-progressive Court. Rather, this is a 3-3-3 Court, with an x-axis of ideology (progressive vs. conservative) and a y-axis of institutionalism (order-loving pragmatists vs. "chaos agents" or doctrinaire originalists). Each justice is somewhere on each of these two axes.

So, the fact that Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh didn’t overturn birthright citizenship doesn’t mean they aren’t conservative. It means they are less willing to use the Court to impose change or require especially clear reasons to do so (Dobbs).

. . .

On the underlying constitutional meaning of the citizenship clause, we disagree with the Court’s majority of five in their defense of birthright citizenship. In this case, while six justices agreed that the executive order was invalid, only five justices defended the birthright citizenship policy. Four justices challenged the birthright citizenship policy, and we think they’re right on the merits.

There is no chance that the 14th Amendment was intended to make citizens of the children of illegal immigrants, or birth tourists. Even defenders of the modern rule generally do not argue that the framers of the 14th Amendment specifically had illegal immigration or birth tourism in mind.

Takeaways: There’s a reason we have nine justices on the Court, and not just one. Nobody is perfect; even Justice Scalia got at least one of his majority opinions very, very wrong (Employment Division v. Smith, 1990). So, conservatives should temper their anger over not getting their way—there were intelligent, conservative textualists and originalists on both sides of this decision.

It was always unlikely that the Court was going to issue a sweeping decision overturning the prevailing interpretation of the 14th Amendment, because of the two axes we described earlier.

It’s important to remember that the Supreme Court is never the final say on any matter of controversy. The political process always has the final say. The political process can make, change or eliminate laws; amend the Constitution; elect the people who nominate and confirm Supreme Court justices; and in extreme circumstances, even impeach justices. Only the Court itself has asserted that it has the final say on constitutional issues.

Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence makes it plain that, in his view, Congress may have statutory room to change birthright citizenship policy, though Congress has not done so. It still can. And that’s not the Supreme Court’s job. That’s our job.

World Wi-Fi Day is recognized each year on June 20. So yes, we missed it by a couple of days.

Wi-Fi is one of those things we take for granted, so it’s useful to be reminded occasionally that Wi-Fi is a thing, that not long ago we didn’t have it, and that we must support policies necessary to preserve its incredible benefits.

Just to level set: The Federal Communications Commission has authority from Congress to free up and then release bands of spectrum for use in communications.

Usually, when we hear about these spectrum releases, it’s spectrum auctions, where companies pay millions of dollars to the federal government to secure portions of licensed spectrum, which will be used exclusively by those companies. We need regular releases of licensed spectrum to support the continued growth of our mobile lifestyles and economy. And Lord knows the Treasury Department needs the money.

But we also need spectrum set aside for unlicensed use, which is where Wi-Fi lives. Wi-Fi travels over “unlicensed” spectrum, which means it’s available to everyone, not just the owners of proprietary spectrum.

Almost 90% of the traffic on your mobile device travels over Wi-Fi rather than over licensed spectrum. That’s because we tend to use our phones more for data than for voice traffic, though even a surprising amount of voice communication is carried over Wi-Fi, whether through Wi-Fi calling on your mobile phone or the many Zoom, Teams, Webex, Google Meet and FaceTime meetings we all depend upon now.

Increasingly, our devices communicate with other devices through Wi-Fi. Right now, my air conditioner and furnace, water heater, home battery back-up and home security system all communicate via Wi-Fi. My propane gas company knows when to refill the tank via Wi-Fi. It seems that Wi-Fi is the basic network we all use most of the time.

But even though Wi-Fi carries more than three times the amount of data that travels over licensed proprietary spectrum, each time new spectrum is anticipated, Wi-Fi is on the defensive.

Since unlicensed spectrum is, well, unlicensed, that means there’s no auction and thus no money for the Treasury Department. Unlicensed spectrum thus needs defending on its merits, not on its tax revenue-generating potential. But as we’ve pointed out, the merits of Wi-Fi are many.

Remember, the internet is a “network of networks.” For a healthy communications ecosystem, we need fiber backhaul, copper where necessary, and both licesed and unlicensed wireless spectrum. Auction revenue matters, but it should not be the final determinant of spectrum policy. If policymakers want the connected economy to keep working for consumers, homes, businesses and innovators, they must continue making the world safe for Wi-Fi.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about government benefits fraud, and the Trump administration has appointed Vice President J.D. Vance to head a new “White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.”

Government benefits fraud is an enormous problem. It plagues all federal benefits programs to one degree or another, like Medicare and Medicaid, Obamacare, Social Security Disability, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Government loan programs are also susceptible to fraud.

Politicians of both parties routinely promise to cut down on “fraud, waste and abuse,” and this sounds good to voters because we know in a government that spends this much money, there must be an awful lot of fraud.

Fraud is a misuse of taxpayer dollars, so of course cutting down on fraud is good. So, we cheer the Trump administration’s efforts to identify fraud and prosecute fraudsters. Go get ‘em.

But the problem is that fraud is inherent in government, because incentives in government are completely different than in the private sector. You can’t “run government like a business” because government isn’t anything like a business.

In a recent hearing, one expert witness estimated that the public sector experiences fraud at a rate of about 20 percent, compared with about 3 percent in the private sector. The private sector does a great job of preventing and identifying fraud because in the private sector saving money is good. Saving money leads to some combination of more profit for shareholders, more jobs and higher salaries for employees, lower prices for customers, and more money to invest in growth. Everyone involved is incentivized to prevent fraud.

But in government, the incentives are the opposite. No one in the chain is incentivized to prevent fraud. In government, the more money you send out the door, the better. The more you spend, the more you get. The bigger your budget, the more employees you supervise, the more influence you wield and the more indispensable your program becomes. Everyone is happy.

And if you delay or refuse to send that check to that recipient, they get angry. They complain. Maybe to their member of Congress. And now the politician is mad at you.

Government programs generally operate under a “pay and chase” approach. Government writes the check, pays the benefit, or issues the loan first, and then if the public becomes aware of massive fraud, government reluctantly goes into chase mode.

In the private sector, there are up-front screens to prevent fraud in the first place, rather than pay and chase. Because the incentives are completely different.

The real problem is big government. The bigger the government, the more opportunities there are for fraud.

That’s why at IPI we argue for limited government, not better government. Better government is nice, sure, but also not very likely.

Today, many so-called conservatives have fallen for the temptation that big government is great as long as they are running it. But that’s a mistake.

The Founders designed a system of limited government, because limited government prevents a multitude of sins.

American law has long recognized that punishment should reflect the harm caused. A man who steals a $50 power tool from a hardware store is a thief. A man who cuts communications lines at a federal building faces felony charges. Yet someone who severs a fiber-optic cable serving 911 dispatch centers, hospitals and first responders in pursuit of scrap copper may face little more than a misdemeanor, if he is charged at all. That is a legal failure.

The data are alarming. Between June 2024 and June 2025, there were 15,540 reported theft and vandalism incidents targeting America's communications networks, disrupting service for more than 9.5 million customers. Nearly 9,800 occurred in the first half of 2025 alone, double the previous six months. This is an accelerating crime wave.

Copper runs through the veins of our communications infrastructure. As prices have climbed near record highs, fueled by demand from renewable energy projects, data centers and AI infrastructure, thieves have read the market signal. What they find in a buried conduit or along a utility pole may fetch a few hundred dollars at a scrapyard. What they leave behind, to paraphrase FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty, is destruction measured in millions of dollars and lives endangered.

The examples are everywhere. In Tucson, Ariz., thieves targeting underground cables knocked out streetlights, creating hazards for drivers and pedestrians. In Los Angeles, copper theft disabled landline communications at fire stations. In Virginia Beach, attacks caused more than $1 million in infrastructure damage. In Kansas City, individuals were charged with cutting cables tied directly to emergency communications. In Pierce County, Wash., thieves used heavy equipment to haul away $55,000 in copper wire and fiber cable.

The damage vastly exceeds the value of the material stolen, making standard theft statutes almost absurd. In a study released last fall, Dr. Edward Lopez examined the true societal costs of these outages. He found that in just six months, communications infrastructure theft and vandalism imposed costs on Americans ranging from $38 million to $188 million. Texas alone bore $18 million.

Federal law imposes up to 10 years in prison on anyone who willfully damages or destroys a communications facility operated or controlled by the federal government. But the same act against a privately owned broadband network is usually punished according to the scrap value of the copper stolen. The severed fiber, interrupted 911 service, disconnected hospital or school without distance learning is largely invisible to the law.

That must change. Communications networks are at least as essential as highways and bridges. State legislatures should treat attacks on privately owned communications infrastructure with the same gravity as attacks on public utilities and government property.

If punishment is supposed to reflect harm, penalties for attacking communications infrastructure should reflect the full cost. Until they do, thieves will continue to conclude that the copper is worth the risk. We should prove them wrong.

A deeply troubling threshold has been crossed. In recent weeks, the national debt (debt held by the public) of the United States has exceeded our gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, we owe more than we produce. This is the first time since World War II that national debt has exceeded GDP.

I’m guessing you haven’t heard anything about it, since neither of our political parties seems the slightest bit interested.

The U.S. incurred massive federal debt during World War II to, literally, save the world. Today, we’re doing it to protect sugar farmers from competition so they can pollute the Everglades, so that transgender prisoners can get taxpayer subsidized gender surgery, and so that people who don’t want to work can live off taxpayers through welfare and disability programs.

Not quite as noble a cause.

Our debt is increasing because we spend more than we take in—a lot more.

For fiscal year 2026, the Congressional Budget Office projects a total deficit of $1.9 trillion, with $7.4 trillion in outlays and $5.6 trillion in revenues. That means the federal government is spending roughly one-third more than it takes in. Map that onto your personal finances and see if you can sleep at night.

All other things being equal, you’d like to be the country that dictates terms to the rest of the world. The United States gets to do that because of the size and strength of our economy. It gives us room to maneuver, and the ability to exert leverage on other countries. It funds a powerful military. History demonstrates that a U.S.-led world order is the best world order. It’s something no one can take from us, but it’s something that we ourselves can abandon.

We know this can’t go on without causing problems. Arguably, it already is, since interest on the debt is now larger than our defense budget, and larger than Medicare. The only federal budget item larger than interest on the debt is Social Security outlays—but at the pace we are going, interest payments will surpass Social Security as well. The opportunity cost of spending $1 trillion a year in interest alone is staggering.

If something can’t go on forever, it will stop. Economist Herb Stein wrote this in the Wall Street Journal in May 1985. Obviously, the debt has become dramatically larger since then, both in real terms and as a percent of GDP.  When will the size of U.S. debt become a real problem? Stein almost certain thought it would have long before now. The truth is, we don’t know when. But these things tend to sneak up on you.

In Hemmingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Mike Campbell is asked about his money troubles:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Ahead of us on the highway, we know the bridge is out. We don’t know where, but we are speeding heedlessly toward it.  

Washington has developed a reliable tell for when an industry wants something it cannot justify on the merits: It puts “AI” in the title.

That is bad for serious debates over artificial intelligence, and it cheapens policy discussions by turning “AI” into a buzzword or sales gimmick.

The instinct is understandable. AI is the defining technology story of the moment, and policymakers are eager to be seen as responsive. That creates an opening, and savvy advocates have not been slow to exploit it. The result is a growing list of proposals that invoke AI while advancing objectives that long predate the current AI debate.

Spectrum policy — the rules governing the allocation, licensing and use of radiofrequency spectrum — is now squarely in this territory. It deserves more careful treatment.

The core facts are clear, even if they are routinely obscured. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of mobile data traffic already travels over Wi-Fi — unlicensed local wireless networks, not licensed cellular networks. Wi-Fi carries roughly 10 times more data than all licensed cellular networks combined. And the architecture of the AI services consumers and businesses are adopting — cloud-dependent, fixed-connection-friendly, built around short prompts and returned responses rather than continuous high-bandwidth streams — does not obviously change that calculus. These facts should be the starting point for any serious analysis.

Given that reality, proposals to reallocate 6 GHz spectrum away from unlicensed use toward exclusive licensed access deserve scrutiny. The 6 GHz band supports the Wi-Fi networks doing much of the heavy lifting in the American wireless data ecosystem. Shrinking that resource in the name of preparing for an AI-driven traffic surge would be an odd response to demand that, based on today’s evidence, is more likely to flow over Wi-Fi than cellular networks.

If anything, forward-looking spectrum policy should look upward, to the Lower 7 GHz band, which sits directly above the current Wi-Fi allocation and could provide meaningful additional unlicensed capacity without displacing what already works.

The enterprise AI story is similarly complex. Private 5G networks, largely running on CBRS spectrum, are increasingly used by manufacturers and industrial operators building AI-powered facilities. Satellite connectivity is attracting serious capital for applications such as drone logistics, where terrestrial infrastructure may be unavailable or unreliable. The AI future will not be dominated by a single spectrum technology. It will rely on heterogeneous networks, unlicensed bands and competitive alternatives.

Licensed spectrum remains important to American AI leadership. But importance is not exclusivity, and proximity to AI is not necessity. Policymakers allocating scarce spectrum resources should ground decisions in data: where AI traffic flows, which connectivity models markets are building and what consumers and businesses need.

Saying “AI” loudly is no substitute for answering those questions.

Aspirational Americans are being priced out of homes. A recent poll found that 65% of Americans believe they will not be able to purchase a home “in the foreseeable future.” Singles who want to put down roots and families who want to grow are growing discouraged about their prospects. So when the Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill 89-10 in March, there was reason for cautious optimism. Congress seemed ready to legislate, for a change.

But the Senate included a harmful provision that would stymie the construction of new homes.

Buried in an otherwise constructive package that streamlines environmental reviews, modernizes manufactured housing rules, and updates multifamily financing tools is a provision bearing the unmistakable fingerprints of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her colleagues in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It mandates that institutional investors must sell build-to-rent homes within seven years of construction.

Every five- or six-years Congress must reauthorize the major federal surface transportation programs, including rail, highways and infrastructure, public transit and major transportation safety programs. And 2026 is the next reauthorization deadline.

The last reauthorization was the bloated “infrastructure bill” passed in 2021 during the Biden administration. That legislation, originally targeted for around $700 billion, ended up a massive $1.2 trillion monstrosity, including green energy project giveaways, ridiculous sums for broadband buildout, and conditions dictated by labor unions and other progressive interest groups. It helped drive the “Bidenflation” that cost American households billions of dollars that they have never gotten back.

It’s crucial that the 2021 mistake not become the baseline for this year’s reauthorization. Congress must find savings everywhere possible and certainly should not tack on further unnecessary spending and giveaways to special interests.

But they might.

Something called the Railway Safety Act has been hanging around Congress ever since the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Because rail is heavily unionized, it was no surprise that Democrats have tried to use the tragedy to benefit labor unions, but then Republican Senator J.D. Vance saw it as an opportunity to burnish his populist bona fides, and has remained stubbornly supportive as vice president.

We learned during the Covid-19 pandemic that we had underestimated the importance of our supply chains, and that supply chain infrastructure should be a priority. But the Railway Safety Act would inhibit freight rail safety by requiring union-mandated crew sizes and other regulations instead of allowing railroads to adopt new technology to make railways safer.

The provisions of the Railway Safety Act, whether they appear in surface transportation reauthorization or in a giant omnibus reconciliation package, would slow down investment in modernizing our freight rail system and improving its resiliency.

Adding additional regulations and mandates have been estimated to cost the economy an estimated $30 billion in lost GDP. While it’s critical for Congress to reduce the inflated infrastructure spending level of the Biden administration, it’s even more important to not impose additional costs on a struggling economy. No one is happy with the economy right now, including voters who supported Republicans in 2024 hoping for a return to the pre-Covid Trump economy. It hasn’t shown up yet, and it certainly won’t show up if Republicans put additional pressures on the supply chain.

The Surface Transportation Reauthorization is being consider in committee this week in Washington. The draft legislation thankfully does not contain the harmful provisions of the Railway Safety Act, but proponents will attempt to add an amendment to the draft language. For the sake of the economy, here’s hoping wiser heads prevail.

The ability of Americans to engage freely and fairly in international commerce is a critical element in the American economy. Since our founding, the United States has leveraged our rich natural resources and our unique ingenuity to compete globally. But our continued ability to compete is now under direct threat from the European Union (EU).

The EU is attempting to impose sweeping, extraterritorial regulations on U.S. companies through the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), alongside its recently adopted AI Act. Together, these overreaching rules risk constraining the growth of artificial intelligence, raising costs for American firms, and slowing the cutting-edge research and deployment that has been a hallmark of America’s global technological advantage for decades.

Under the CSDDD, American companies could be forced to conduct expansive human-rights and environmental due diligence well beyond their direct operations simply to access the European market. These obligations would spike operational expenses and regulatory compliance burdens and could force some companies to lay off staff or scale back operations.

The requirements mandated by the CSDDD go far beyond U.S. law, substitute European policy preferences for American democratic decision-making, and impose legal uncertainty that discourages innovation.

It’s almost as if the CSDDD was specifically designed to hinder America’s competitive advantages over Europe.

Businesses in the natural resources and manufacturing sectors are the most at risk from Europe’s regulatory agenda. Agriculture, energy, mining, timber, and advanced manufacturing form the backbone of the U.S. economy; however, they are all under threat if CSDDD takes effect. These sectors are also essential for fueling the growth of advanced technologies, including AI, cloud computing, and data center infrastructure. Maintaining and, in some cases, expanding access to these supplies is critical to the economic survival of many communities across the country.

AI has the potential to improve lives through medical breakthroughs, safer infrastructure, smarter logistics, and more efficient energy use. Yet, by saddling U.S. innovators with vague, expansive obligations, Brussels risks slowing the very technologies that could deliver environmental and social benefits for people worldwide. Beyond the expansive compliance requirements imposed by the CSDDD, European AI regulations may force U.S. companies to face additional obligations due to the immense resources required to generate, store, and process high-volume, high-impact data necessary for AI systems. It will chill investment, delay deployment, and divert resources from innovation to bureaucratic compliance.

The stakes are particularly high for America’s energy-intensive AI infrastructure. Maintaining a robust U.S. energy supply is essential to the continued growth of data centers, computing hubs, and next-generation digital infrastructure, to say nothing of energy affordability. Foreign sustainability regimes with extraterritorial reach like CSDDD pose significant risks to the United States’ competitiveness and technological leadership.

This is not cooperation; it is regulatory overreach. In fact, the trade agreement framework reached between the U.S. and EU back in August explicitly states that the Europeans would address American concerns about CSDDD. Yet as it currently stands, EU politicians are pressing forward with this extraterritorial regulation, violating an agreement they made with President Trump.

That’s why Members of Congress like Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) are cautioning against CSDDD which would force America to import “Europe’s green energy regulatory framework” that could harm the “all of the above energy approach needed to win the AI race.” With little hope of changing the direction EU politicians are going, it’s time for Congress to act on legislation to protect U.S. businesses from having to adhere to CSDDD. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) and Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) have such legislation in the works and policymakers should prioritize its passage before European laws begin to harm American companies.

Leadership in AI will not be achieved by importing Europe’s regulatory model. It will be secured by unleashing American ingenuity, backed by reliable energy, clear rules, and a regulatory system accountable to the American people—not foreign bureaucracies.

Every few years, some brave souls in Congress propose immigration reform — and every time it happens, critics react with the same knee-jerk accusation: “Amnesty!” But this radioactive charge is inaccurate when lobbed against the Dignity Act (H.R. 4393), a bipartisan proposal that gives Congress a chance to do what it seems to have forgotten how to do — legislate to solve a problem.

Calling the Dignity Act “amnesty” is not just wrong — it reveals a misunderstanding of what amnesty is. This isn’t semantics — it’s political history. A brief look at two of the most famous American amnesties — Jimmy Carter’s pardon of Vietnam draft dodgers and Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration law — makes the distinction clear.

Start with Carter. In 1977, on his first full day in office, he issued a blanket pardon to those who had evaded the Vietnam draft. It was unconditional. No fines, no penalties, no requirements to “make things right.” The pardon applied regardless of whether individuals had been prosecuted or even admitted wrongdoing.