As widely reported this week, the Trump administration has apparently sent memos to several federal agencies — including the EPA, HHS, the Interior Department, and the USDA — ordering them not to issue any press releases, publish new materials on their web sites, or post on their social media accounts. The memo to the EPA apparently […]
Donald Trump’s team has led an insurrection against the dogma of free trade, calling for a revision or dissolution of NAFTA and killing US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They promise to “repeal and replace” the prevailing multilateral system with bilateral deals that do a better job of allocating trade gains to the U.S. (and, […]
This post was coauthored by Nicholas Bagley and Adrianna McIntyre. The executive order President Trump signed on Friday does not have any immediate policy effect, but it does call attention to the wide range of administrative actions that a Trump administration could take to change the Affordable Care Act—all without legislation from Congress. We’ve compiled […]
Today, a group of constitutional law scholars apparently plan to file a federal lawsuit alleging that President Trump is violating the Emoluments Clause because his hotels are receiving payments from foreign governments. Although the meaning of the clause is up in the air, roughly speaking the clause prohibits federal officials from taking payments from foreign […]
Today I start a semester-long academic fellowship in Senator Orrin Hatch’s Office to work on judicial nominations and regulatory reform legislation. Due to joining the Senate staff, my blogging (and tweeting) will be limited to conform to these new professional obligations (and the Senate ethics rules). For instance, I won’t be blogging about any potential regulatory reform […]
Eight years ago I was a law clerk for the D.C. Circuit — and I had a great view of the U.S. Capitol. In fact, my view was almost postcard perfect. Further, as you no doubt recall, January 2009 was an eventful time in the city. It does not happen often that a new President […]
There are some misconceptions floating around about what the executive order does and doesn’t do. Let me try to clarify. As I explained in a post last week, “[a]uthority to implement the ACA … is vested in the Secretaries of HHS, Treasury, and Labor—not the President. In the context of the ACA, an executive order […]
At the American Bar Association’s annual Administrative Law Conference in December, I had the privilege of moderating a panel entitled Your Agency Is Not That Special: The Decline of Administrative Law Exceptionalism. The panel consisted of leading experts on administrative law exceptionalism from three distinct regulatory fields: Jill Family for immigration, Kristin Hickman for tax, […]
Kevin Outterson and I have an op-ed in the New York Times today on combating antimicrobial resistance. Here’s a snippet: [W]e will miss antibiotics when they’re gone. Minor scrapes and routine infections could become life threatening. Common surgeries would start looking like Russian roulette. Gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted infections might become untreatable. Diseases that […]
Over at Jotwell, Kathryn Watts reviews my co-blogger Nick Bagley’s latest article, Remedial Restraint in Administrative Law, which is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review. We need more scholarly discussion on remedies in administrative law — Sam Bray’s new paper on nationwide injunctions comes immediately to mind — and Professor Watts’s review and Nick’s article are terrific […]
Last year was a terrific one for administrative law scholarship! Here is the December 2016 edition of the most-downloaded recent papers (those announced in the last 60 days) from SSRN’s U.S. Administrative Law eJournal, which is edited by Bill Funk. Changing Climate Change, 2009-2016: A Preliminary Report by Cass R. Sunstein [CJW Note: This is Professor […]
In PHH v. CFPB, the D.C. Circuit last October held unconstitutional Congress’s decision via the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to limit the grounds upon which a president could dismiss the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Whether or not that ruling survives, Professors Aditya Bamzai and John F. Duffy have […]
Three years ago, and without notice, data about patients with substance use disorders began to disappear from Medicare and Medicaid files widely used in health services research. Because researchers had been afforded access to those data for decades, the change was mystifying. Austin Frakt raised an alarm, and he and I began to look into […]
According to Vice-President-elect Pence, “We’re working now on a series of executive orders that will enable that orderly transition to take place even as Congress appropriately debates alternatives to and replacements for ObamaCare.” This talk about using executive orders to assure an “orderly transition” is a bit confusing. An E.O. has legal force “only if […]
I received an email this morning from a friend observing that “it’s like the D.C. Circuit is actively trying to undermine your column by never issuing any opinions!” Perhaps. We are two weeks into 2017 and the D.C. Circuit has said nothing.* What should I do? Take the week off I suppose. That said, here […]