During the 2017 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump was open about his hostility toward Iran and his disdain for the Obama administration’s diplomacy with that country. Since January, the Trump administration has been engaged in an Iran policy review. News reports and leaks...

An often overlooked aspect of the Jones Act is its environmental effects. By raising the cost of waterborne transportation, the law encourages the use of alternative forms of transport such as trucks and rail. These alternative means of moving goods generate more greenhouse gases and emit...

Informal land tenure continues to be the norm in developing countries despite billions spent on land administration and reform programs in the last 20 years. The problem goes deeper than insufficient funding or poorly executed projects. By strengthening public land registry institutions that...

One provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that has been delayed until 2017 is a federal mandate for standard menu items in restaurants and some other venues to contain nutrition labeling. The motivation for so-called "menu mandates" is a concern about rising obesity...

Pundits have lately been declaring the 112th and 113th Congresses the “least productive” in recent history. Why, they passed fewer than 600 laws between them! One leading writer even called the 113th “by just about every measure, the worst Congress ever,” surely overlooking the...

Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth as a threat. China currently ranks second, or perhaps even first, in the world in gross domestic product (although 78th in per capita GDP), and the fear is that China will acquire military prowess commensurate with its wealth and...

Espionage poses a threat to national security and the private property rights of Americans. The government should address the threat of espionage in a manner whereby the benefits of government actions taken to reduce it outweigh the costs of those actions. To aid in that goal, this policy...

The devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns on various forms of transportation create an opportunity to review the successes and failures of federal transport policies before Congress reauthorizes federal highway and transit programs. After a one‐​year extension...

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s proposal to make the United States a “world leader” in high‐​speed rail would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt for construction of new rail lines plus tens of billions of dollars of annual deficit spending to subsidize operating...