#congressional budget office

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Elizabeth Warren on weaponized budget models

In yesterday’s essay, I broke down the new series from The American Prospect on the hidden ideology and power of budget models, these being complex statistical systems for weighing legislative proposals to determine if they are “economically sound.” The assumptions baked into these models are intensely political, and, like all dirty political actors, the model-makers claim they are “empirical” while their adversaries are “doing politics”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/04/cbo-says-no/#wealth-tax

Today edition of the Prospect continues the series with an essay by Elizabeth Warren, describing how her proposal for universal child care was defeated by the incoherent, deeply political assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office’s model, blocking an important and popular policy simply because “computer says no”:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-04-policymakers-fight-losing-battle-models/

When the Build Back Better bill was first mooted, it included a promise of universal, federally funded childcare. This was excised from the final language of the bill (renamed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill), because the CBO said it would cost too much: $381.5b over ten years.

This is a completely nonsensical number, and the way that CBO arrived at it is illuminating, throwing the ideology of CBO modeling into stark relief. You see, the price tag for universal childcare did not include the benefits of childcare!

As Warren points out, this is not how investment works. No business leader assesses their capital expenditures without thinking of the dividends from those investments. No firm decides whether to open a new store by estimating the rent and salaries and ignoring the sales it will generate. Any business that operates on that basis would never invest in anything.

Universal childcare produces enormous dividends. Kids who have access to high-quality childcare grow up to do better in school, have less trouble with the law, and earn more as adults. Mothers who can’t afford childcare, meanwhile, absent themselves from the workforce during their prime earning years. Those mothers are less likely to advance professionally, have lower lifetime earnings, and a higher likelihood of retiring without adequate savings.

What’s more, universal childcare is the only way to guarantee a living wage to childcare workers, who are disproportionately likely to rely on public assistance, including SNAP (AKA food stamps) to make ends meet. These stressors affect childcare workers’ job performance, and also generate public expenditures to keep those workers fed and housed.

But the CBO model does not include any of those benefits. As Warren says, in a CBO assessment, giving every kid in America decent early childhood care and every childcare worker a living wage produces the same upside as putting $381.5 in a wheelbarrow and setting it on fire.

This is by design. Congress has decreed that CBO assessments can’t factor in secondary or indirect benefits from public expenditure. This is bonkers. Public investment is all secondary and indirect benefits — from highways to broadband, from parks to training programs, from education to Medicare. Excluding indirect benefits from assessments of public investments is a literal, obvious, unavoidable recipe for ending the most productive and beneficial forms of public spending.

It means that — for example — a CBO score for Meals on Wheels for seniors is not permitted to factor in the Medicare savings from seniors who can age in their homes with dignity, rather than being warehoused at tremendous public expense in nursing homes.

It means that the salaries of additional IRS enforcers can only be counted as an expense — Congress isn’t allowed to budget for the taxes that those enforcers will recover.

And, of course, it’s why we can’t have Medicare For All. Private health insurers treat care as an expense, with no upside. Denying you care and making you sicker isn’t a bug as far as the health insurance industry is concerned — it’s a feature. You bear the expense of the sickness, after all, and they realize the savings from denying you care.

But public health programs can factor in those health benefits and weigh them against health costs — in theory, at least. However, if the budgeting process refuses to factor in “indirect” benefits — like the fact that treating your chronic illness lets you continue to take care of your kids and frees your spouse from having to quit their job to look after you — then public health care costings become indistinguishable from the private sector’s for-profit death panels.

Child care is an absolute bargain. The US ranks 33d out of 37 rich countries in terms of public child care spending, and in so doing, it kneecaps innumerable mothers’ economic prospects. The upside of providing care is enormous, far outweighing the costs — so the CBO just doesn’t weigh them.

Warren is clear that there’s no way to make public child care compatible with CBO scoring. Even when she whittled away at her bill, excluding millions of families who would have benefited from the program, the CBO still flunked it.

The current budget-scoring system was designed for people who want to “shrink government until it fits in a bathtub, and then drown it.” It is designed so that we can’t have nice things. It is designed so that the computer always says no.

Warren calls for revisions to the CBO model, to factor in those indirect benefits that are central to public spending. She also calls for greater diversity in CBO oversight, currently managed by a board of 20 economists and only two non-economists — and the majority of the economists got their PhDs from the same program and all hew to the same orthodoxy.

For all its pretense of objectivity, modeling is a subjective, interpretive discipline. If all your modelers are steeped in a single school, they will incinerate the uncertainty and caveats that should be integrated into every modeler’s conclusions, the humility that comes from working with irreducible uncertainty.

Finally, Warren reminds us that there are values that are worthy of consideration, beyond a dollars-and-cents assessment. Even though programs like child care pay for themselves, that’s not the only reason to favor them — to demand them. Child care creates “an America in which everyone has opportunities — and ‘everyone’ includes mamas.” Child care is “an investment in care workers, treating them with respect for the hard work they do.”

The CBO’s assassination of universal child care is exceptional only because it was a public knifing. As David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud wrote in their piece yesterday, nearly all of the CBO’s dirty work is done in the dark, before a policy is floated to the public:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-03-hidden-in-plain-sight/

The entire constellation of political possibility has been blotted out by the CBO, so that when we gaze up at the sky, we can only see a few sickly stars — weak economic nudges like pricing pollution, and not the glittering possibilities of banning it. We see the faint hope of “bending the cost-curve” on health care, and not the fierce light of simply providing care.

We can do politics. We have done it before. Every park and every highway, our libraries and our schools, our ports and our public universities — these were created by people no smarter than us. They didn’t rely on a lost art to do their work. We know how they did it. We know what’s stopping us from doing it again. And we know what to do about it.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: A disembodied hand, floating in space. It holds a Univac mainframe computer. The computer is shooting some kind of glowing red rays that are zapping three US Capitol Buildings, suspended on hovering platforms. In the background, the word NO is emblazoned in a retrocomputing magnetic ink font, limned in red.]

[trendynewsnow]

Understanding Tax Cuts and the Republican Debate on 2017 Tax Legislation

What Constitutes a Tax Cut? This question has become a focal point for many Republicans on Capitol Hill as they deliberate the pace and extent of potential tax reductions. The intricate mechanics of federal budget assessments are poised to play a pivotal role in this ongoing discussion. A major catalyst for this debate is the impending expiration of numerous tax cuts enacted by Republicans in…

[aanews69]

Entregamos historias. También te damos guías, consejos y trucos sobre cómo crear el tuyo propio. Este canal está dedicado a cosas aleatorias que pasan por nu...

[notayesmanseconomics]

Will the expanding US fiscal deficit derail things?

Last week I looked at the US economy noting its good GDP performance in 2023 and also the fiscal issue. The latter got a bit of an update as the week progressed. Here is the Congressional Budget Office. In CBO’s projections, the federal budget deficit in fiscal year 2024 is $1.9 trillion. Adjusted to exclude the effects of shifts in the timing of certain payments, the deficit amounts to $2.0…

[minnesotafollower]

Another Documentation of the U.S. Need for Immigrants   

Just yesterday this blog published a lengthy post about how the problems in the U.S. asylum system were promoting increases in U.S. immigration that were benefiting the U.S. economy.[1] Now the New York Times has published a lengthy article focusing on the positive impact of new immigrants to this country with its declining and aging population.[2] The Example of the State of Maine The State of…

[headlinehorizon]

Federal Budget Deficit Reaches $383 Billion: Latest News from the Congressional Budget Office

The Congressional Budget Office reports a staggering $383 billion deficit in the first two months of fiscal year 2024. Find out the factors contributing to this significant increase in spending and its implications for the economy. Stay updated with the headline horizon of the federal budget.

[thenewdemocratus]

Sam Seder: Video: ObamaCare Equals Freedom?

. The New Democrat Freedom if that is really what this is about is the ability for people to run their own lives and be able to make the decisions about their own lives. And I’m talking about both from an economic and personal vantage point. And to get that freedom people have to have the skills they need to be able to make the income to live in that freedom. Which is why education is so…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The problem with economic models

When students of statistics are introduced to creating and interpreting models, they are introduced to George Box’s maxim:

All models are wrong, some are useful.

It’s a call for humility and perspective, a reminder to superimpose the messy world on your clean lines.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this article to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

Even with this benediction, modeling is forever prone to the cardinal sin of insisting that complex reality can be reduced to “a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless plane.” Partially that’s down to human frailty, our shared inability to tell when we’re simplifying and when we’re oversimplifying.

But complex mathematics are also a very powerful smokescreen: because so few of us are able to interpret mathematical models, much less interrogate their assumptions, models can be used as “empirical facewash,” in which bias and ideology are embedded in equations and declared to be neutral, because “math can’t be racist.”

The problems with models have come into increasing focus, as machine learning models have increasingly been used to replace human judgment in areas from bail assessment to welfare eligibility to child protective services interventions:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/31/automating-inequality-using-algorithms-to-create-a-modern-digital-poor-house/

But even amidst this increasing critical interrogation of models in new domains, there is one domain where modeling is all but unquestioned: economics, specifically, macroeconomics, that is, the economics of national government budgets.

This is part of a long-run, political project to “get politics out of budgeting” -a project as absurd as “getting wet out of water.” Government budgeting is intrinsically, irreducibly political, and there is nothing more political than insisting that your own preferences and assumptions are “empirical” while anyone who questions them is “doing politics.”

This model-first pretense of neutrality is a key component of neoliberalism, which saw a vast ballooning of economists in government service — FDR employed 5,000 economists, while Reagan relied on 16,000 of them. As the jargon and methods of economics crowded out the language of politics, this ideology-that-insisted-it-wasn’t got a name: economism.

Economism’s core method is reducing human interaction to “incentives,” to the exclusion of morals or ethics — think of Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that “there is no such thing as society.” Economism reduces its subjects to homo economicus, a “rational,” “utility-maximizing” automaton responding robotically to its “perfect information” about the market.

Economism also insists that power has no place in predictions about how policies will play out. This is how the Chicago School economists were able to praise monopolies as “efficient” systems for maximizing “consumer welfare” by lowering prices without “wasteful competition.”

This pretense of mathematical perfection through monopoly ignores the problem that anti-monopoly laws seek to address, namely, the corrupting influence of monopolists, who wield power to control markets and legislatures alike. As Sen John Sherman famously said in arguing for the Sherman Act: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life.”

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Economism says that we can allow monopolies to form and harness them to do only good, enforcing against them when they abuse their market dominance to hike prices. But once a monopoly forms, it’s too late to enforce against them, because monopolies are both too big to fail and too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

Today, economism is helpless to do anything about inflation, because it is ideologically incapable of recognizing the inflation is really excuseflation, in which monopolists blame pandemic supply shocks, Russian military belligerence and supposedly overgenerous covid relief programs for their own greedy profiteering:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Mathematics operates on discrete quantities like prices, while power is a quality that does not readily slot into an equation. That doesn’t mean that we can safely discard power for the convenience of a neat model. Incinerating the qualitative and doing arithmetic with the dubious quantitative residue that remains is no way to understand the world, much less run it:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Economism is famously detached from the real world. As Ely Devons quipped, “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

But this disconnection isn’t merely the result of head-in-the-clouds academics who refuse to dirty their hands by venturing into the real world. Asking yourself “What would I do if I were a horse?” (or any other thing that economists are usually not, like “a poor person” or “a young mother” or “a refugee”) allows you to empiricism-wash your biases. Your prejudices can be undetectably laundered if you first render them as an equation whose details can only be understood by your co-religionists.

Two of these if-I-were-a-horse models reign invisibly and totally over our daily lives: the Congressional Budget Office model and the Penn Wharton Budget model. Every piece of proposed government policy is processed through these models, and woe betide the policy that the model condemns. Thus our entire government is conducted as a giant, semi-secret game of Computer Says No.

This week, The American Prospect is conducting a deep, critical dive into these two models, and into the enterprise of modeling itself. The series kicks off today with a pair superb pieces, one from Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the other from Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud, chief economist for the Groundwork Collaborative.

Let’s start with the Stiglitz piece, “How Models Get the Economy Wrong,” which highlights specific ways in which the hidden assumptions of models have led us to sideline good policy (like increasing spending during recessions) and make bad policy (like cutting taxes on the rich):

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-03-how-models-get-economy-wrong/

First, Stiglitz sets out a general critique of the assumptions in neoclassical models, starting with the “efficient market” hypothesis, that holds that the market is already making efficient use of all our national resources, so any government spending will “crowd out” efficient private sector activity and make us all poorer.

There are trivially obvious ways in which this is untrue: every unemployed person who wants a job is not being used by the market. The government can step in — say, with a federal jobs guarantee — and employ everyone who wants a job but isn’t offered one by the public sector, and by definition, this will not crowd out private sector activity.

Less obvious — but still true — is that the private sector is riddled with inefficiencies. The idea that Google and Facebook make “efficient” use of capital when they burn billions of dollars to increase their surveillance dragnets is absurd on its face. Then there’s the billions Facebook set on fire to build a creepy dead mall it calls “the metaverse”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Then we come to some of the bias in the models themselves, which consistently undervalue the long-run benefits of infrastructure spending. Public investments of this kind “yield very high returns,” which means that even if a public sector project reduces private sector investment, the private investments that remain produce a higher yield, thanks to public investment in a skilled workforce and efficient ports, roads and trains.

A commonplace among model users is that we must make “The Big Tradeoff” — we can either reduce inequality, or we can increase prosperity, but not both, because reducing inequality means taking resources away from the business leaders who would otherwise build the corporations whose products would make us all better off.

Despite the fact that organizations from the OECD to the IMF have recognized that inequality is itself a brake on economic growth, fostering destructive “rent seeking” (seen today online in the form of enshittification), the most common macroeconomic models continue to presume that an unequal society will be as efficient as a pluralistic one. Indeed, model-makers treat attention to inequality as an error bordering on a mortal sin — the sin of caring about “distributional outcomes” (that is, who gets which slice of the pie) rather than “growth” (whether the pie is getting bigger).

Stiglitz says that model makers have gotten a little better in recent years, formally disavowing Herbert Hoover’s idea of expansionary austerity, which is the idea that we should cut public spending when the economy is shrinking. Common sense tells us that this will make it shrink faster, but expansionary austerity (incorrectly) predicts that governments that cut spending will produce “investor confidence” and trigger more private investment.

This reliance on what Paul Krugman calls the “Confidence Fairy” is tragically misplaced. Hoover’s cutbacks made the Great Depression worse. So did IMF cutbacks in “East Asia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.”

Expansionary austerity is politics dressed up as economics. Indeed, the political ideology subsumed into our bedrock models has caused governments to fail to anticipate crisis after crisis, including the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.

The politics in modeling are especially obvious in the process running up to the Trump tax cuts (as is often the case with Trump, he draws with a fisted crayon where others delicately shade with a fine pencil, making it easier to see the work for what it is) (see also: E. Musk).

Axiomatic to model-building is the idea that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it (“incentives matter”). The theory of corporate tax cuts goes like this: “if we tax corporations for the money they might otherwise use to build new plant and hire new workers, they will do less of those things.”

That’s a reasonable assumption — which is why we don’t tax companies on capital investments and their payrolls. These expenses are deducted from a company’s profits before it calculates its taxes. Corporate taxes are levied on profits, net of spending on labor and plant.

But when the CBO modeled the Trump cuts, it operated on the assumption that the existing tax system was punishing companies for hiring people and expanding operations, and thus concluded the reducing taxes would lead to more of these activities. On that basis, the tax cuts were declared to be expansionary, a means of driving new private sector activity. In reality, all they did was create more profits, which rich people used to bid up the prices of assets, creating a dangerous asset bubble — not investment in productive capacity.

In “Hidden in Plain Sight,” the other Prospect piece that dropped today, Dayen and Mabud tell us just how wrong the models were about the Trump cuts:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-03-hidden-in-plain-sight/

The CBO predicted that the cuts would drive a 0.7% increase in GDP over a decade, while Penn Wharton predicted 0.6–1.1% growth. Both were very, very wrong:

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/789540931/2-years-later-trump-tax-cuts-have-failed-to-deliver-on-gops-promises

Despite the manifest defects of these models, we still let them imprison our politics. When Elizabeth Warren proposed a 2% wealth tax on assets over $50m, she asserted that this would reduce billionaires’ fortunes by $3.75T over 10 years, but the Penn Wharton model knocked $1T off it, and declared that the real impact of the policy would be a reduction in investment, depressing long-run growth. The politics of a wealth tax are sound — the kind of politics that wins elections and restores faith in democracy — but the economism of models sweeps the proposal off the table and into the dustbin of history.

The Penn Wharton model simply refuses to factor in absolutely key aspects of a wealth tax plan, from the impact of increased enforcement to the economic benefits of universal child care, increased education funding, student debt cancellation and other programs that could be enacted with the fiscal space opened up by reducing billionaires’ spending power.

The Warren policy is rare because we got to hear about it — through a national election campaign — before it was strangled by the model-makers. More often, proposals like this are quietly snuffed out even before they’re introduced to the legislature, when they are run through the model and told Computer Says No.

Modeling isn’t intrinsically bad, but “all models are wrong” and what determines whether a model is useful are the politics of its assumptions. Economism insists that there are no politics in model-making, which creates unfixable flaws in its models.

One core political assumption in economism’s models is that government shouldn’t exercise power to produce outcomes — rather, it should “nudge” markets with incentives (which, we are constantly reminded, “matter”). This means that we can’t ban pollution — we can only offer “cap and trade” systems to incentivize companies to pollute less. It means we can’t do Medicare For All, we can only “bend the cost-curve” with minor interventions like forcing hospitals to publish their rate-cards.

Economism — and its institutions, like the CBO — are “short-run Keynesian and long-run classical” — that is, they only consider the benefits of public spending over the shortest of timespans, and assume that these evaporate over long time-scales. That’s exactly backwards, as anyone who’s ever traveled on a federal highway or visited a national park can attest:

https://prospect.org/politics/congress-biggest-obstacle-congressional-budget-office/

All of this is worsened by politicians, who exploit the primacy of economism to attack their adversaries. When the CBO or Penn Wharton release a report on a policy, they often wrap their conclusions with caveats about uncertainties and ranges — but these cautions are jettisoned by opportunistic politicians who seize a single headline figure and use it as a club against their opponents.

In the coming week, the Prospect will run deep dives into the defects of CBO and Penn Wharton, along with other commentary. It’s very important work, throwing open the doors to the inner sanctum of economism’s sacred temple. I’ll be following it eagerly.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: bert knottenbeld (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/bertknot/8375267645/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[[Image ID: A Tron-like plane of glowing grid-squares. Two spherical cows roll about on the plane, chased by motion lines. The gridlines are decorated with complex equations from the Penn-Wharton Budget Model.]]

[robertreich]

The Truth About Immigrants and the Economy

Immigrants are good for the economy and our society! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

For centuries, immigration has been America’s secret sauce for economic growth and prosperity.

But for just as long, immigrants have been an easy scapegoat.

One of the oldest, ugliest lies is to falsely smear immigrants as criminals.

It’s just not true. Crime is way down in America. Anyone who says otherwise is fearmongering.

And whatever crime there is is not being driven by immigration. Immigrants, regardless of citizenship status, are 60% less likely to be incarcerated for committing crimes than U.S.-born citizens.

Maybe that’s why border cities are among America’s safest.

Immigration opponents also claim immigrants are a drag on the economy and a drain on government resources.

Rubbish!

Quite the opposite, the major reason immigrants are coming to America is to build a better life for themselves and their families, contributing to the American economy.

The long-term economic benefits of immigration outweigh any short-term costs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that adding more immigrants as workers and consumers — including undocumented immigrants — will grow America’s economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade. And those immigrants would increase tax revenue by about $1 trillion, shrinking the deficit and helping pay for programs we all benefit from.

Immigrants of all statuses pay more in taxes than they get in government benefits. Research by the libertarian Cato Institute found first-generation immigrants pay $1.38 in taxes for every $1 they receive in benefits,

This is especially true for undocumented immigrants, who pay billions in taxes each year, but are excluded from almost all federal benefits. After all, you need documentation to receive federal benefits. Guess what undocumented immigrants don’t have. Hello?

And of course, one of the most common anti-immigrant claims also isn’t true.

No. Immigrants are not taking away jobs that Americans want. Undocumented immigrants in particular are doing some of the most dangerous, difficult, low-paying, and essential jobs in the country.

Despite what certain pundits might tell you, immigration has not stopped the U.S. from enjoying record-low unemployment.

And as the Baby Boom generation moves into retirement, young immigrants will help support Social Security by providing a thriving base of younger workers who are paying into the system. The fact that so many immigrants want to come here gives America an advantage over other countries with aging populations, like Germany and Japan.  

What’s more, immigrants are particularly ambitious and hardworking. They are 80% more likely to start a new business than U.S. born citizens. Immigrant-founded businesses also impressively comprise 103 companies in last year’s Fortune 500.

And immigrants continue to add immeasurably to the richness of American culture. We should be celebrating them, not denigrating them.

It’s time to speak the facts and the truth. We need immigrants to keep our economy — and our country — vibrant and growing. They are not “poisoning the blood” of our nation. They’re renewing and restoring it.

[centrally-unplanned]

Listening to Linkin Park vtuber covers while at work fantasizing about founding a militant revolutionary centrism faction. AK-47's and berets passing along not-so-subtle threats of violence to any politician who doesn't poll-test their messaging for cross-tab demo appeal. Storming the offices of every rep that releases legislative proposals that haven't been appropriately scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Show trials with stacked crowds jeering and mocking the victims for their refusal to restructure primaries along electorally-maximizing lines. The dream.

[userautumn]

Fact Check & Recap (Oct. 8, 2024):

Mike Johnson, a Republican in the House of Representatives [Legislative Branch, the branch of US Government that has several powers assigned exclusively to it, including the power to initiate revenue bills, impeach federal officials, and elect the President in the case of an Electoral College tie] is hesitant to reconvene the House to provide disaster relief funding until after United States Presidential election, which will occur on November 5th, 2024.

Joe Biden, the current United States President, wrote a letter urging Congress [Congress is comprised of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate takes action on bills, resolutions, amendments, motions, nominations, and treaties by voting] to provide funding to the Small Business Administration's disaster relief loan program to help the effected communities rebuild and cover financial losses due to natural disaster.

Mike Johnson is refusing on the grounds that the individual states which were effected "need some time to [calculate the actual damages]."

Donald Trump and the Republican party are claiming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is allocating funds toward aiding migrants who are entering the country illegally. This information is false. FEMA and Border Control are two different divisions with two different avenues of funding [FEMA is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, and the funds cannot be reappropriated for another division. Source: Congressional Budget Office; FEMA Hurrican Helene Fact Check Rumor Response]

Mike Johnson is using this lie to divide the American people and to foster a sense of distrust in FEMA, one of the agency's Donald Trump plans to gut and disable through state-by-state privatization once he enacts his harrowing Project 2025 plan.

Johnson has said, "The American people are disgusted by [the Biden Administration allegedly using FEMA money for migrant relocation], up with it, and so are Republicans in Congress. And it will stop after Nov. 5, because we’re going to have unified government with Republicans in charge and we will bring sanity back to this situation.”

Source (NBC News):

Mike Johnson won't commit to bringing House back before the election for more hurricane relief.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Biden urged Congress to restore funding to the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program as it faces potential funding shortfalls.

By Summer Concepcion

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday did not commit to calling Congress back into session before the election after President Joe Biden pressed congressional leaders about potential funding shortfalls in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Johnson was asked about Biden’s letter to congressional leaders on Friday requesting more money for federal disaster recovery efforts and after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the department doesn’t have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season.

In his letter, the president urged Congress to restore funding to the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, which was facing potential funding shortfalls even before Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the Southeast. The president noted that the White House requested more funding for the program as Congress prepared a short-term funding bill that passed last month to avert a government shutdown.

Pressed on whether he would call Congress back into session before the election, Johnson replied, “We’ll be back in session immediately after the election.”

“That’s 30 days from now. The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that,” Johnson said, adding that determining “specific needs and requests based upon the actual damages” from natural disasters takes time.

Johnson noted that before Congress went on recess, the day before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, Congress appropriated $20 billion additional dollars to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to address immediate needs.

“Then after that, Congress always takes its the due approach of providing what is necessary,” he said. “Congress will provide. We will help people in these disaster-prone areas. It’s an appropriate role for the federal government, and you’ll have bipartisan support for that, and it’ll all happen in due time, and we’ll get that job done. There shouldn’t be any concern about that.”

Johnson’s comments come after Biden said in remarks at the White House last week he expects to ask Congress for a supplemental funding request for areas affected by Hurricane Helene.

Asked at the time whether he would ask Congress to return from recess for a special session for a supplemental request, the president left the possibility open, saying, “That is something I may have to request, but no decision’s been made yet.”

Congress has taken swift action on funding natural disaster relief efforts in the past even when it was on recess, a Biden administration official noted when reached for comment.

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Johnson was also pressed about false claims by some Republicans that FEMA was using funds on migrants who have illegally entered the country instead of on the disaster response, which White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called “categorically false” on Friday.

The speaker acknowledged that the streams of funding for the border and hurricane response are different at FEMA before going on to insist that FEMA’s mission is to help people affected by natural disasters, and not engage in funding that helps migrants who crossed the southern border.

Johnson claimed, without evidence, that the Biden administration, Vice President Kamala Harris and Mayorkas “have been engaged in this program,” saying they used taxpayer dollars to assist migrants with resettlement by reimbursing nongovernmental organizations transporting migrants into the country.

“The American people are disgusted by this, up with it, and so are Republicans in Congress,” he said. “And it will stop after Nov. 5, because we’re going to have unified government with Republicans in charge and we will bring sanity back to this situation.”

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how does the state have any legitimacy left. supreme court justices arguing over the presidential immunity of roosevelt and kennedy, who could not have been prosecuted post-presidency because they died in office, whether setting precedent for presidential immunity will intefere in our ability to like, do a coup on fidel castro, or how to effectively prevent an immune president from assassinating a political rival as an official act. meanwhile, the biden administration has shipped a dock across the closed roads to gaza for PR so that continuing to congressionally allocate billions of dollars of war profiteering does not make them look like they approve of genocide. nobody seems to be aware there's a long historical tradition of photographs of student protesters brutalized by police being the cause of an uprising out of outrage. we fucked around, found out, banned tiktok in the house, the senate, and by presidential signature just to try to pressure bytedance to sell it to a nonchinese holding company, and they said "no, we'd like to see how you're going to administrate this" exactly like i predicted three weeks ago. they can't govern using a method other than budget reconciliation genuinely how are they going to ban an APK. i've been saying it for years but we need to take nuclear silos out of the hands of these maniacs before this shambolic wreck wholly collapses. we can't even have post offices, hospitals, or pandemic response without running them into the ground for profit

[mariacallous]

This summer, the Supreme Court is poised to overturn a cornerstone of administrative law known as "Chevron deference." Established in the 1984 case Chevron v. NRDC, this doctrine instructs courts to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of laws where the underlying statute is ambiguous (or even silent). Absent Chevron, Congress could be forced to be much more specific in how it crafts legislation, delegates authority, and conducts regulatory oversight. If it refuses to adapt, agencies could be incapacitated and service delivery could stall.

Ironically, the effort to dismantle Chevron and return responsibility to the legislative branch may happen amid a historically unproductive and divided Congress. Briefing and oral arguments for Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the case challenging the 1984 decision, raised questions about Congress' preparedness. And outside the Court, commentators fear Congress may be too broken to fix.

As close watchers of efforts to modernize Congress over the past decade, we don't share that pessimism. But a lot will have to change. In the 40 years since Chevron was decided, Congress has seen worsening dysfunction and atrophy. Staffing on House committees has shrunk by 41 percent. Critical support offices like the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office have downsized by more than 25 percent. Meanwhile, the complexity of the federal bureaucracy has increased immensely.

While Chevron is often described as diminishing congressional authority, that's not entirely accurate. Rather than stealing authority from Congress, the ruling created the political conditions for Congress to be deliberately ambiguous, and punt contentious policy details to the executive branch. This change was then followed by a hollowing out of committee expertise, increased dependence on lobbyists, centralization of power in leadership, and more gridlock. As attorney Paul Clement argued in Loper Bright v. Raimondo:

Chevron is a big factor in contributing to gridlock. And let me give you a concrete example. I would think that the uniquely 21st-century phenomenon of cryptocurrency would have been addressed by Congress, and I certainly would have thought that would have been true in the wake of the FTX debacle. But it hasn't happened. Why hasn't it happened? Because there's an agency head out there that thinks that he already has the authority to address this uniquely 21st-century problem with a couple of statutes passed in the 1930s.

A post-Chevron world could force Congress to increase its internal capacity, invest in expertise, overhaul its processes, better monitor implementation, and respond more quickly. If not, depending where SCOTUS comes down, things could start to break.

Massive institutional reforms in Congress are rare and usually come in response to a crisis or scandal, whether post-Nixon budget changes, post-Jack Abramoff lobbying reform, or post-9/11 security changes (including the embrace of email after Anthrax attacks).

More recently, we saw continuity upgrades accelerated during the pandemic, and Congress is now responding with remarkable haste to responsibly adopt AI tools. Since 2019, a bipartisan modernization effort in the House has produced and implemented over 100 reforms, creating a virtuous cycle in which members, staff, and outside experts work together to improve the institution.

Post-Chevron, these efforts need to be dramatically expanded. This will require not just incremental adjustments but a comprehensive upgrade in resources, staffing, and operations. It will require a major increase to the legislative branch's budget even as the U.S. faces a difficult fiscal outlook. Indeed, while Congress is a mere 0.1 percent of federal expenditures, it has long been a salient and politically expedient place for politicians to make cuts.

One key area where Congress will need to improve is its regulatory monitoring and oversight. AEI scholars Kevin Kosar and Philip Wallach proposed a vehicle for this change: a new "Congressional Regulation Office" (CRO). The CRO would undertake critical tasks such as conducting benefit-cost analyses of significant agency rules, performing retrospective reviews to assess the effectiveness and impact of existing regulations, and identifying redundancies or conflicts across the regulatory landscape. Another approach would be to build this function inside of an existing agency, such as the Government Accountability Office or the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition to building a new regulatory support function, Congress will need to bolster its staff capacity and technology resources, with a particular focus on committees with substantial regulatory jurisdiction, as well as support agencies.

Unfortunately, to date, we are unaware of any major hearings or other efforts in Congress to address this challenge. Meanwhile, court watchers see that an upheaval to Chevron is coming. Regardless of where you come down on the merits of the case, it's crucial to get ready. While most will be focused on the November election throughout 2024, some of the biggest changes coming to Congress may soon be decided by nine votes.