Salazar negotiated across the aisle, secured 20 Republican and 20 Democratic co-sponsors, and produced actual legislation with actual enforcement mechanisms. Some of her Republican colleagues responded with a super PAC, a pile-on, and not a single idea of their own.

What is happening to Salazar is a disgrace. Rep. Brandon Gill called this bill an “unforgivable political betrayal.” Laura Ingraham ambushed her on air. A brand-new PAC called Homeland launched with the sole purpose of ending the career of every Republican who dares cosponsor it. These are not serious people raising serious objections. They are cowards from blood-red districts who have decided that savaging a Cuban-American congresswoman is easier than doing their jobs. Rep. Brandon Gill called the bill “mass amnesty” and an “unforgivable political betrayal.” Gov. Ron DeSantis echoed him.

The “amnesty” smear is an absolutely disingenuous and actually a deliberate lie. Amnesty means a free pass. As outlined above, this bill is the opposite of that. As Salazar put it, the real amnesty is the current system, where nobody registers, nobody is accountable, and Washington has punted for thirty years.

Here is the question none of them even attempt to answer: What is your plan? What do you do with 11 to 12 million people who are not going anywhere? These critics are not interested in solutions. For them, immigration is not a problem to fix, it is a wound to keep open. Open wounds bleed votes and donations.

When Gill called her a traitor on social media, Salazar’s response was not a polished press release. It was: “READ. THE. BILL. BEFORE. YOU. OPEN. YOUR. MOUTH.” That is someone who has done the work and has zero patience for cheap shots from people who have not.

And the mass deportation alternative? Deporting 11 million people is not a policy, it is a bumper sticker. The logistics alone would break the federal government. The politicians screaming for it know it is never going to happen. It is a pose, a very profitable, politically convenient pose.

Salazar is not perfect. This bill is not perfect. But she showed up, did the work, and is now standing in the fire while many in her own party try to burn her down. Her critics have produced nothing, risked nothing, and offered nothing. America has had thirty years of the performance. It is time for someone who actually shows up.

Trump received far more. Incredibly, in addition to this fund, the agreement included a sweeping order that forever bars the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, and his businesses on already-filed returns. It is clear the settlement had nothing to do with legitimate damages. It was pure personal self-serving power abuse. Just consider the absurdity: if all 405,400 affected taxpayers received the same $1.8 billion payout Trump demanded, the total would reach nearly $730 trillion. That is more than seven times the entire global money supply. Republican senators pushed back hard. A court paused the fund, and the administration has retreated from it. But the audit immunity remains in place.

This settlement violates basic constitutional principles. No president in history has used the Department of Justice he controls to grant himself and his family lifetime protection from normal tax enforcement. It creates one set of rules for Trump and another for the other 405,400 similarly situated taxpayers.

This is more of the same pattern and follows a growing list of perverse self-aggrandizing pursuits:

• Forcing his name ahead of John F. Kennedy on the Kennedy Center in an ego-driven overriding of a Congressional directive.

• Demanding his face adorn a $250 bill — an act of ego so absurd no prior president has ever attempted it.

• Appointing Bill Pulte, a man with zero national security credentials, as Acting Director of National Intelligence.

• Insisting on unconstitutional layered tariffs (and asserting new unconstitutional tariffs after his earlier one have been declared unconstitutional) while doling out billions in socialist-style bailouts to farmers crippled by his own policies.

• Ruthless revenge campaigns against fellow Republicans such as Bill Cassidy and Thomas Massie who dared to cross him, knowing full well that this severely damaged the Republican brand and its chances to succeed in the midterms.

• Endorsing Ken Paxton over the far more qualified John Cornyn, in a blatant display of cronyism with absolute disregard of how it may have handed a safe Republican seat to the Democrats.

• Launching vindictive perjury investigations against political enemies like Letitia James, E. Jean Carroll, and Jim Comey.

And this only scratches the surface.

Defenders who wave away every Trump action as necessary toughness need to face facts. When a president settles with himself for billions in taxpayer money, demands audit immunity his own DOJ cannot legally promise, and faces backlash even from his own party, it is not fighting the deep state — it is becoming it. True fiscal responsibility and equal treatment under the law demand we call this out. No leader gets a pass on undermining separation of powers. Americans who believe in limited government must insist on better from everyone who holds power.

Tier 6 reforms became law in 2012 because pension costs were already exploding. Because New York courts had previously ruled that pension benefits for existing employees could not be diminished or impaired — even for future years of service — the state could only apply meaningful changes to new hires. The benefits already earned (and those that would accrue under the prior overly generous formulas) were locked in, making it impossible to negotiate reductions for the current workforce even for future services, despite the clear long-term threat of bankruptcy-level costs.

To control those unsustainable costs for future employees, the state created a more modest Tier 6 that applied only to new hires. Ideally, this should have shifted new employees to a defined-contribution plan similar to 401(k)s common in the private sector, where costs are predictable and transparent. Instead, due to the unions’ collusive power, lawmakers settled for a less expensive but still defined-benefit plan. They slightly raised retirement ages, increased employee contribution rates, and used a longer salary averaging formula to reduce pension “spiking” through overtime manipulation. These reforms still left new public employees with benefits far in excess of what is available in the private sector. Virtually no private-sector workers receive guaranteed defined-benefit pensions at all. Instead, they now rely on defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s.

But now Albany is doing the unthinkable: rolling back even these mild reforms. Governor Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers recently approved major “Fix Tier 6” changes. These changes effectively negate the fiscal discipline introduced in 2012 by giving the then-new hires the richer, more expensive benefits previously reserved for earlier tiers. The package lowers contribution rates and lets teachers retire as early as age 58! In the real world, outside government, that sounds almost fantasy-level generous. It is projected to cost taxpayers roughly $557 million annually while affecting more than 830,000 public employees. What was sold as necessary “fixes” is really handing a windfall to employees who were already more than happy to work under the more restrained Tier 6 terms.

Incredibly, recipients of these outsized pension benefits also enjoy a significant additional perk: their pensions are completely exempt from New York State and local income taxes. This tax-free treatment is a vestige from decades ago when public-sector salaries were lower and such enhancements were used to attract workers. In today’s environment of already extremely generous benefits, this exemption is particularly egregious.

Supporters claim richer pensions are needed for recruitment and retention. That argument does not hold up at all. Public employees in New York already receive total compensation packages — including salaries, pensions, health benefits, overtime protections, and job security — that are well in excess of the private sector. Many workers also boost pensions through overtime-heavy final working years. Meanwhile, taxpayers funding these benefits have far less generous retirement plans themselves. Even worse, New York’s Constitution makes pension benefits nearly untouchable. Article V, Section 7 states that pension benefits “shall not be diminished or impaired.” The New York Court of Appeals has gone further, opining that these protections not only prevent reductions but effectively require preserving (and in practice expanding) benefits attributable to future earnings. That means politicians can promise massive long-term benefits today while pushing much of the financial burden onto future taxpayers who had no say in the deal.

The long-term consequences are obvious. Rising pension costs squeeze infrastructure spending, pressure local governments, and fuel higher taxes. New York is already struggling with outmigration, slow growth, and one of the heaviest tax burdens in the country. Yet Albany continues acting as though taxpayers have unlimited money. They do not. New hires should move to defined-contribution retirement plans similar to what exists throughout most of the private sector. Without serious reform, pension obligations will continue driving New York deeper into the same fiscal hole politicians claim they are trying to escape.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this problem almost 90 years ago. In 1937, Roosevelt wrote to the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) warning that collective bargaining “cannot be transplanted into the public service.” He called public-sector strikes “unthinkable and intolerable.” Why? Because government workers are not bargaining against private owners risking their own money. They are bargaining against taxpayers. New York ignored that warning completely. Today, unions spend heavily on elections and lobbying to help elect friendly politicians. In 1975, Victor Gotbaum of District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) admitted the reality out loud: “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.” At least he was honest about the racket.

The costs are enormous. Public sector contracts in New York include expensive overtime rules, almost impenetrable job protections that make it nearly impossible to fire anyone, and pension benefits that are many times greater than anything seen — or even negotiable — in the private sector.

When negotiations break down, disputes go to compulsory arbitration. Supposedly this process protects the public interest. In reality, these arbitrators are selected by the same partisan interests that negotiated the unfair settlement in the first place. Therefore, arbitrators approve compensation increases far above what comparable workers receive in the private sector.

This entire system is rigged against the taxpayer. The fix is obvious. Collective bargaining for public employees should be sharply limited so that compensation, benefits, and work rules do not exceed what is available in the private sector. In addition, the arbitration process should be reformed with truly impartial arbitrators who are required to focus on private-sector comparisons.

The tipping point is here. Honest leaders must name the collusion, confront the racket, and restore accountability. Taxpayers have paid enough.

And then came Zohran Mamdani’s justification for this nonsense. On Tax Day, standing outside Kenneth Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse as part of a campaign-style video rollout for the proposal, Mamdani declared that the tax was aimed at people “who store their wealth in New York City real estate” even though the residences “sit empty most of the time.” I will get to the economic stupidity of this in the following paragraph. But think about how dangerous, abusive, and economically illiterate that mindset really is. Since when does government get to decide whether you are using your own lawful property often enough to avoid punishment? A second home is not tax evasion. An empty apartment is not a public emergency. If someone buys property legally, pays every existing tax legally owed, and follows every law on the books, government has no moral claim to confiscate more simply because politicians dislike how the owner uses the property. That is not taxation based on neutral principles. It is ideological punishment disguised as fiscal policy.

The economic stupidity here is remarkable even by Mamdani standards. High-end property owners already subsidize an enormous share of local government spending. As even the New York City Comptroller’s own report on the pied-à-terre proposal acknowledges, high-value property owners already contribute heavily to New York City’s tax base, yet politicians still insist on treating them like undertaxed villains. Many pied-à-terre owners do not even consume large amounts of city services. They are part-time residents paying full freight into the system. Yet politicians want to squeeze them harder because the money has to come from somewhere, and frankly class warfare polls well. We have already watched wealthy residents and businesses flee high-tax states for greener pastures. Punitive taxation accelerates capital flight, depresses property values, weakens construction incentives, and ultimately shrinks the tax base. Worse still, this proposal is built on the poisonous assumption that government has first claim on private property and citizens merely rent what they “deserve” to keep.

What makes this especially dangerous is how casually politicians now abandon constitutional and economic principles in pursuit of envy-driven politics. Today it is second homes. Tomorrow it will be retirement accounts, investment portfolios, or anyone deemed insufficiently “fair” by activists who have never created wealth in their lives. New York does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending addiction and a political class that treats productive citizens like an ATM. Calling this nonsense a “tax” does not make it legitimate. It just makes the theft sound more polite.

Thomas traced this philosophy directly to Woodrow Wilson and the early progressives. Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and his allies openly took it from Otto von Bismarck’s state-centric Germany, which they admired. They strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, inalienable individual rights were “a lot of nonsense.” He redefined liberty as something granted by government rather than a gift from God that precedes government. Thomas noted that since Wilson’s time, progressivism has made many inroads in our system and way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist. Progressives showed contempt for ordinary Americans, preferring rule by experts over self-government. Thomas pointed out that the European ideas they copied helped produce the worst regimes of the 20th century — Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao — all hostile to natural rights.

This fight runs much deeper than the tax and spending battles I usually cover at TaxPolitix.com. Reagan-era principles delivered real results because they limited government, cut taxes, and trusted free markets and individual liberty. Progressivism delivers the opposite: rule by administrative agencies, endless bureaucracy, and political decisions that favor special interests over equal treatment under the law. I have warned for decades that this government-first philosophy crowds out personal freedom and fiscal responsibility. Thomas is right. It was a terrible mistake to adopt progressivism’s rejection of the Declaration’s vision of universal, inalienable natural rights. As Calvin Coolidge said, if all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. No advance can be made beyond these propositions.

Congressional conservatives and libertarians must stop fighting only the symptoms. They must continuously raise the issue that progressivism and our Constitution don’t mix. It is bad enough when Democrats push these ideas. It is worse when others adopt the same top-down mindset. I have often questioned in these pages whether even President Trump has clear constitutional or statutory authority for sweeping actions like widespread tariffs. When any executive claims it alone knows what is best for the country and sidelines Congress, it echoes the progressive belief in government supremacy. Lawmakers must defend natural rights and founding principles now. Anything less risks permanent damage to limited government and individual liberty for all Americans.

The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) has qualified the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act for the November ballot. It would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion. Proponents claim this will raise roughly $100 billion for healthcare, K-12 education, and food assistance. They ignore the obvious. Wealthy people do not sit still for confiscatory taxes. They react — and California’s high earners have been fleeing for years to no-income-tax states like Florida, Texas, and Nevada, taking their businesses, jobs, and ongoing tax payments with them.

When these billionaires leave, California loses far more than any one-time wealth tax haul. Those individuals pay substantial state income taxes every year, generate sales taxes on major purchases, and drive investment that creates jobs and future taxpayers. New entrepreneurs who might build the next generation of billionaires will simply launch companies elsewhere. Frédéric Bastiat warned us 175 years ago about “that which is seen and that which is not seen.” Politicians see the immediate revenue and spending. They miss the unseen damage to the tax base, economy, and state finances. Even Governor Gavin Newsom has warned this measure will drive people out and damage California — yet union-backed forces push ahead anyway. Elizabeth Warren has an economics degree but still champions similar ideas, showing that credentials do not equal sound thinking. As the old Abbott and Costello skit shows: Abbott says:“How could you say that? Didn’t you go to school, stupid?” Costello replies: “Yes; and I came out the same way.”

Free markets, individual liberty, and fiscal responsibility grow real prosperity — punitive wealth taxes do not. California voters must reject this measure in November. Anything less proves you cannot tax your way to fiscal health and will only accelerate the state’s long-term decline.

The choice then becomes either to ship from one US port to another at an outrageously expensive cost, (assuming such ships actually even exist), or else to ship our oil from US ports to foreign locations, requiring us to import oil from other foreign entities. This obviously substantially increases the cost of what Americans have to pay for their oil.

This administration decided to temporarily suspend the Jones Act -- initially to May 17 but has now extended it to mid-August, citing the unnecessary economic burden it places on Americans through higher prices. The Jones Act was originally enacted specifically for national security reasons for the purpose of solidifying our shipbuilding capability. However, the opposite has occurred; our shipbuilding capability has been decimated and in addition, the cost of shipping has skyrocketed as has our ability of being able to hire inexpensive shipping from our allies

The irony here is not lost: more than one hundred years after the Jones Act was established, we clearly see it costs us more money without actually making us safer. Thus, the question remains -- if the Jones Act just increases costs for Americans, why not just eliminate it for good and not merely suspend it?

The Internal Revenue Service remains one of the federal government’s most critical yet chronically undermined agencies. Its core mission — administering tax laws with fairness and efficiency — faces its greatest obstacle not from internal mismanagement, but from the staggering complexity Congress has built into the Internal Revenue Code.

Decades of legislative additions have created a maze of overlapping rules, conflicting definitions, and compliance obligations so dense that even experienced professionals struggle to apply them consistently. This structural flaw generates errors throughout the system: Taxpayers file incorrectly despite good-faith efforts, preparers provide flawed guidance, and IRS personnel interpret provisions unevenly. Countless mistakes go unnoticed due to the agency’s resource shortages, resulting in selective enforcement, inconsistent compliance, and profound damage to public confidence in the tax system’s equity and reliability.

Congress holds primary responsibility for this mess, yet it continues to worsen the problem through irresponsible legislation.

Enacted last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) exemplifies the pattern. Presented as broad-based relief, the law makes permanent many provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, increases standard deductions, and introduces populist exemptions — including no tax on tips (with a $25,000 cap and income phase-outs), no tax on overtime pay, additional deductions for seniors ($6,000, but only through 2028), expanded child tax credits, and new savings vehicles labeled “Trump Accounts.”

While politically attractive, these features add significant complexity to filing one’s taxes: intricate eligibility tests, phase-out calculations, additional reporting mandates, and retroactive modifications requiring IRS to overhaul forms, issue guidance, and educate millions of filers.

Rather than streamlining the code, the OBBB layers targeted carveouts onto an already convoluted framework, inflating error-prone areas and driving deficits higher by trillions, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office and independent analysts. This approach substitutes fiscal discipline with gimmicks — distorting economic incentives, granting unequal advantages, and undermining the principle of equal treatment under the law.

The fallout is starkly visible in the IRS’s current operations. Severe workforce reductions — roughly 27 percent since early 2025, including substantial drops in key filing-season divisions — have pushed the agency to extreme measures. The IRS is now involuntarily reassigning employees from human resources, information technology, and administrative roles — many lacking any direct tax experience — to frontline duties such as answering taxpayer inquiries and processing returns.

Hiring remains woefully inadequate, with only a small fraction of authorized positions filled and training periods of up to 80 days delaying readiness. Backlogs of unprocessed items have climbed to approximately 2 million cases, reflecting significant increases from prior periods, while phone service targets have been lowered from 85 percent to 70 percent.

Internal assessments highlight the risk of dramatically higher error rates, as reassigned staff lack the expertise to detect fraud, resolve complex issues, or adequately support small businesses with notoriously complicated tax filings. Specialized functions, including ethics oversight and recruitment, have been depleted to fill these gaps, further impairing the agency’s long-term capacity.

This crisis represents more than a temporary strain; it is a deliberate structural failure. Congress crafts ever more intricate laws and selective relief packages, then underfunds enforcement through persistent salary limitations and aggressive recent cuts.

The result? Major corporations continue to benefit from dedicated, experienced auditors, while individuals and small businesses encounter less-qualified or temporarily reassigned personnel, despite facing comparable complexity. The OBBB’s new requirements and retroactive elements exacerbate the strain exactly when resources are thinnest, guaranteeing prolonged delays, widespread inaccuracies, and growing taxpayer frustration.

Meaningful correction to the tax code cannot rely solely on internal adjustments or unproven technology. Genuine progress requires principled congressional intervention.

First, Congress ought to prioritize targeted simplification in persistently high-error domains — the Earned Income Credit, international tax obligations, and the fresh complexities introduced by OBBB provisions — by eliminating redundancies and unnecessary phaseouts.

Second, it should reform federal pay structures to enable recruitment and retention of skilled professionals, correcting the imbalance that disadvantages ordinary taxpayers.

Third, it should commit resources to specialized training for agents serving individuals and small businesses, ensuring competence amid ongoing complexity.

Fourth, it ought to implement enforceable case-management standards: prompt acknowledgment of correspondence, defined resolution timelines, and transparent communication to eliminate indefinite delays.

And fifth, Congress should strengthen partnerships with professional organizations, such as state CPA societies, to foster mutual understanding and practical improvements between the IRS and the practitioner community.

The IRS is indispensable to sustaining limited government, yet it cannot function effectively when Congress treats the tax code as an instrument of political influence and the agency as expendable. Absent serious simplification, proper resourcing, and restored accountability, the system faces collapse — further jeopardizing individual liberty, equal justice, and fiscal prudence.

American taxpayers deserve a tax system worthy of their confidence and trust. They’re currently not getting anything close to that.

I have followed Orban for years. His Fidesz party launched in 1988 was a straight-up classical liberal outfit that fought communism for open society, rule of law, and low taxes. By 2010 the party grabbed a two-thirds supermajority and Orbán went full strongman. He rewrote the constitution overnight, packed the constitutional court, forced judges into early retirement, and handed loyalists nine- and twelve-year terms in every oversight body. The Cato Institute just documented the wreckage: Hungary dropped from 31st to 67th on the Human Freedom Index, now dead last in the European Union (EU). Private pension savings worth 10 percent of GDP got nationalized. Hundreds of companies in banking, energy, and telecom were seized or muscled into sale to regime buddies. All of it was explicit policy. Orbán himself said prior center-right governments failed because they never built “their own” loyal capitalists. Economic growth lagged behind Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria despite pouring in EU subsidies equal to 4 percent of GDP some years. And he cozied up to Russia the whole time. This is not conservatism. It is textbook big-government overreach that destroys markets and individual liberty.

Peter Magyar, the adversary who just beat Orbán and now serves as Prime Minister, seems to stand for the original free-market principles Orbán abandoned. But the jury is still out on him. We are hoping he is the real deal, but we need to make sure he follows through and doesn’t turn out to be simply Orbanism without Orban.

JD Vance flying to Budapest to stump for the crook was simply out of his mind. Orbán spent sixteen years blocking the EU, cozying up to Russia, and thumbing his nose at the United States while his cronies looted the place. We do not need that model here. I have warned for years that executive power grabs, whether Trump-style tariffs without clear congressional authority or Orbán-style court packing, shred separation of powers and invite the exact corruption we see in Budapest. American conservatives should reject this illiberal nonsense, demand minimal government and equal treatment under the law, and cheer the new Hungarian leader who proves you can still win on the principles that once made Fidesz great. Anything less sells out the free-market legacy we claim to defend.

I warned when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last year that it ranked as the worst piece of tax legislation in U.S. history, and the overtime fiasco is just one of the provisions that proves it. What the statute actually delivers is not “no tax” on overtime at all. It is a deduction—available only to workers in jobs covered by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—for exactly one-third of the total overtime pay they actually receive. If your regular rate is $20 an hour and you earn $30 for overtime hours, only the extra $10 qualifies; the first $20 does not. The deduction is capped at $12,500 for singles and $25,000 for married couples filing jointly, then phases out once income hits $150,000 single or $300,000 joint. It does not apply to overtime required by state laws, private agreements, or special federal rules for railroad and airline workers. None of that fine print made it into the campaign speeches. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) never required employers to report the qualifying amount on W-2s this year, so Box 14 numbers are all over the map—some list the full overtime pay, others guess, and many put down nothing. Tax preparers are now buried in pay-stub math just to fix it. The Treasury Department’s own data released this month show nearly 22 million returns—more than 20 percent of all filers—have already taken the break, blowing past every full-year forecast. With the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) now operating on a severely cut budget, it still had to do the extra work of implementing the One Big Beautiful Bill—and now faces the massive additional burden of chasing down clearly erroneous claims that stem from huge numbers of taxpayers remembering the campaign promise, not the tax law itself.

This mess is exactly why limited government and simple tax rules matter. Instead of Reagan-era principles—lower, flatter rates on a broader base that treat all income the same—we got targeted gimmicks sold with slogans that no one read the fine print on. The deduction sunsets after 2028 unless Congress extends it; Congress should kill it now, before the audits start, the fraud penalties fly, and another layer of bureaucratic waste cements itself into the code. Taxpayers deserve straight talk and fiscal sanity, not more Washington smoke and mirrors that turn honest overtime into a compliance nightmare.

I guarantee the same fiasco is going to happen when the IRS gets around to auditing the results of no tax on tips and no tax on Social Security.

I’ve been documenting this wealth migration for years, and the latest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data reported by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on March 27 confirms the damage. Between 2022 and 2023—the most recent years available—New York lost a net $9.9 billion in adjusted gross income as high earners fled to lower-tax states. California lost $11.9 billion, Illinois $6 billion, Massachusetts $4 billion, and New Jersey $2.6 billion. Meanwhile, Florida gained $20.6 billion, Texas $5.5 billion, and Tennessee $2.8 billion. Punitive tax rates are a major driver: New York City’s top combined rate hits 14.8 percent while states with no income tax keep attracting capital and jobs. This is basic economics. We learned in the Reagan era that lower marginal rates encourage work, investment, and growth. Today’s soak-the-rich policies do the reverse.

Hochul and New York’s progressive leaders need to wake up before it’s too late. Begging millionaires to return to subsidize ever-growing social spending while refusing to cut taxes, slash red tape, or dial back the renewable mandates that are inflating energy costs is pure fiscal madness. When the next market correction or recession hits, states overly dependent on high earners will face painful shortfalls. The only real solution is smaller government, lower taxes, and greater economic freedom. Until high-tax states like New York embrace those principles, productive Americans will keep voting with their feet—and taking their money with them.

Signed on March 13, 2026, and titled “Removing Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Home Construction,” the order directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Secretary of the Army to streamline stormwater, wetlands, and Clean Water Act permitting rules that now tack on months or years of delays and tens of thousands of dollars in costs. It orders the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to expand categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) for housing projects and related infrastructure. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) must publish best practices for states and cities — things like capped permit timelines, lower fees, by-right development, and fewer mandates on manufactured and modular homes — while offering federal incentives to governments that actually adopt them.

This move is long overdue because federal red tape is a major reason new homes are so expensive. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that regulations now add roughly 24 percent — about $94,000 — to the price of an average single-family home, with permitting delays averaging seven months or longer. The same NEPA and Clean Water Act bottlenecks have crippled energy projects, infrastructure upgrades, and manufacturing facilities for decades. I have long argued, along with the Cato Institute, that these rules hand unelected bureaucrats and activist groups a veto over private development with zero accountability. Ronald Reagan showed in the 1980s that slashing regulatory burdens unleashes real economic growth — by deregulating airlines and trucking, which slashed prices, boosted competition, and created millions of new jobs; this order simply applies that same proven logic to one of the biggest markets Americans care about.

I strongly support expanding this approach beyond housing because the same government interference strangles growth in energy, small business, and manufacturing too. Even more important, HUD’s best-practices list gives states and cities a ready-made playbook to fix their own zoning, building codes, and local permitting disasters that are often far worse than Washington’s. If governors and mayors — especially in high-cost blue states that cling to restrictions that block new homes near existing neighborhoods and “green” mandates — refuse to copy the model, they will look ridiculous when housing stays unaffordable on their watch. This order can also turbo-charge the growing YIMBY housing movement that says yes to new development in their own backyards, finally increasing supply instead of endlessly restricting it. This order does not rewrite statutes or claim new executive power; it simply tells agencies to use the authority they already have to cut unnecessary burdens. Congress should codify these reforms, and every governor and mayor who claims to care about affordable housing should follow suit immediately — before another generation gets locked out of the American Dream.

Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 lets the President impose a temporary 15 percent import surcharge for up to 150 days only when there is a “fundamental international payments problem,” specifically a large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficit, an imminent dollar crash in foreign markets, or an international payments disequilibrium that needs fixing. That language was written in the early 1970s for the old fixed-exchange-rate world under Bretton Woods. Once those rates floated freely after 1971, the crisis the statute targeted simply vanished. Under those rules, the international balance of payments is simply not a problem and is generally acknowledged as such. Even Trump’s own lawyers admitted months ago in court filings that Section 122 has “no obvious application” to ordinary trade deficits. This is not a close call; it is an intentional stretch of a never-used provision the Supreme Court just forced him to swap in after striking down his earlier IEEPA tariffs.

Tariffs are taxes on American buyers and businesses, they raise costs across the supply chain, and they distort free markets exactly the way I have warned for decades. Justifying hundreds of billions in extra costs on companies and consumers with a rule that has been dead letter for fifty years is not clever policy—it is abuse of power that threatens the separation of powers and the rule of law. Courts are already hearing challenges; they should kill this fast. Congress needs to step up, repeal or rewrite these outdated tools, and stop letting any president—Republican or Democrat—play fast and loose with our economy. Limited government and real free markets demand nothing less.