Welcome to Cato Audio for May 2023. I'm Caleb Brown. In this month's offering, Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Kaine reviews what made the costly Iraq war possible. Former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller discusses with Cato's Justin Logan a very different grand strategy. Cato's Mark Calabria details his new book covering his time as a federal regulator. And in our Cato Audio exclusive, Cato's Tommy Berry discusses ways to rein in the executive branch with respect to the administrative state. First up, this month's Cato Roundtable.
Jennifer, you and I recorded a podcast recently in which the part of the discussion was how far behind courts are when it comes to dealing with issues and state legislatures and Congress dealing with issues of technology that is advancing very rapidly. And right now we're in a situation where technology is evolving very rapidly. Congress has, let's say, politically productive avenues for, at the very least, pounding the podium about technology. Of course, we're talking about Congress and. Big tech, for lack of a better term. I'm speaking with Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, and Jennifer Huddleston, a research fellow at the Cato Institute. So before we start recording, we're thinking about where do we start? But let's start sort of historically. What do you put as sort of the germ, the kernel that began what is now a bipartisan?
it seems, although not bipartisan in terms of reform necessarily, but bipartisan in terms of having specific and large substantive complaints against technology companies and social media platforms broadly. Will? I think it largely starts in 2016 on first the left and then the right. You have Facebook and social media blamed not just for electing Donald Trump, but really a worldwide populist uprising. And then the right in response and in response to platform changes.
feeling as though they're discriminated against. And so you end up with a situation where, at least when it comes to content policy, the left and the right want diametrically opposed changes. And so nothing can really happen. I would largely agree with Will, although I think in some cases it depends on what precisely you're talking about in technology. When we're talking about kind of...
Questions around social media platforms or, you know, the kind of traditional, quote unquote, big tech companies. I think a lot of that stems from around the 2016 election for different reasons on both sides of the aisle. But some of the other technology policy questions that we've seen, questions around things like youth online safety, go a bit further back. We've seen this happen with any kind of new technology, new disruptive technology. You know, there was a fight over that in the internet in the late 90s, early 2000s. Before that, it was video games and rock music. We've seen the kind of technology itself change, but seen these kind of same concerns arise again and again. Similarly, when it comes...
to new transportation technology and whether or not there needs to be changes to the regulatory system for things like driverless cars or dockless scooters. We've seen that come up with other transportation situations in the past. And then I think there are these kind of... tangential issues to what we think of as traditionally tech policy, things like the sharing economy and debates over whether or not there should be any changes to worker classifications that have been going on since we saw some of these new platforms arise like Uber and Lyft. And this Congress, as bold and, well, let's just say it's stupid as a lot of their policy proposals can be, it betrays a real lack of understanding about how these systems or platforms work. They're more than happy to try to interrupt or destroy business models, but they can't seem to agree on.
precisely how to do that. And we have certain provisions of the Bill of Rights that make it very difficult for Congress to do that effectively. Let's go a little bit in order here, because if conservatives have felt discriminated against, this is after the left blamed Facebook for helping elect Donald Trump, what have been their responses broadly? They want to get into the algorithms. They want to understand more directly if there are humans intervening on behalf of preventing conservative content from being spread widely. Yeah, I think they're too...
broad strategies. One is to limit platforms' ability to moderate content. This runs into both First Amendment and sort of practical issues. But when you feel as though platforms are discriminating against you, that's one sort of logical, rational approach is to say, you know, you just, you can't remove as much. Who cares if your platform is overrun by spam? The other approach really is to
simply try to harm platforms. There's a feeling that platforms are against the right, even though relative to cable news and prior forms of media, the rights had a huge boost online. But nevertheless, you'll see support on the right for efforts to repeal Section 230 entirely, which would, of course, really harm conservative speech because platforms would suddenly be exposed to liability for anything that Donald Trump says on them. But the feeling is that that's a cost worth paying for hurting a hated enemy in big tech. It's foolish, but it is an attitude. Jennifer, related to that, the...
the way that this likely would be done, that kind of regulation, firms like Facebook could be convinced that, hey, this regulatory apparatus that you want to construct, this actually helps us relative to competitors. When we're looking at potential changes to something like Section 230, I think it's important to recognize how much of the internet involves user-generated content and that we're not just talking about those few large platforms that may have become effectively household names. We're not just talking about the Facebooks and the YouTubes and the Twitters. We're talking about a lot of other platforms such as Reddit. We're talking about platforms that may be providing reviews for users when it comes to planning a trip or finding a restaurant. We're talking about the comment sections on kind of traditional newspapers. And even things like Wikipedia are all considered user-generated content. And therefore, Section 230 comes into play in those cases. What's also important to remember, though, is that these platforms are private actors and they themselves have their own first...
Amendment rights around the content that they decide to carry and the content that they decide to take down in some cases. So when we're thinking about this, we have to think about the much broader range of platforms that it may impact, and particularly the impact it may have on those smaller and mid-sized platforms that don't necessarily have an army of lawyers to fight every lawsuit that might get brought. To get to a more contemporary example, TikTok has galvanized people on both sides regarding how it is able to perhaps not radicalize, as YouTube is accused of, but give people a warped view of the world. Well, TikTok is certainly one of those areas of low-hanging policy where there's a lot of frustration and anxiety about it on both sides of the aisle. And it implicates some of these concerns we have about children online and how youth are using the internet as well. So it's certainly an area where you could see either congressional action. You might see both parties in agreement in doing something narrow to harm TikTok. Now, that's not to say that action won't have broader consequences. A lot of the bills that have been proposed to...
get at TikTok, would empower the government to police foreign speech more generally. But in general, it represents a novel threat to a lot of American policymakers because it's the first time we've seen a foreign platform really succeed on its own merits in this country. And that raises a lot of questions that previously other countries had to deal with vis-a-vis Facebook, but we didn't have to deal with vis-a-vis anyone else's platforms. I think there's been this convergence of several different policy concerns that have made TikTok really in the spotlight for Congress. The first one, of course, is the China concerns and the national security issues that we've seen brought up in some of these contexts. The questions about data and data privacy and access to Americans' data that were certainly one of the many topics that were front and center in the recent congressional hearings. But beyond that, you also have questions about the fact that young people are...
using this app. And whenever there's a new app, we seem to have this bit of discomfort if it's popular with young people and questions of what's going on with this app's particular algorithm, why it's different, why young people like it, trying to really understand, you know, what's going on there in some cases, but that's also leading to calls to regulate it. And then finally, again, you have questions about the content and debates on the right about are conservatives not having enough of a voice? Is their content being censored? But on the left as well, concerns about dis and misinformation, sometimes tied directly to the concerns about China, but sometimes just about the content that's available.
app in general. This is to say nothing about, as somebody described it to me, we created God in March of 2023. Perhaps overstating it just a bit, but the idea that AI platforms, chat GPT, generative AI, are going to... Well, what are they going to do, Bill? It's a very exciting space that has the capacity to offer us all sorts of new labor-saving tools if our government doesn't get in the way. Unfortunately, really, over the past couple weeks, there's been a push in the United States to regulate or place guardrails on AI, ostensibly because Europe and China are coming up with their own rules. And practically, a global state of affairs in which America produces new technologies and other countries produce rules is perfectly fine so long as their rules aren't encroaching upon our production of new useful things.
Our legislators seem to want to play keeping up with the Joneses, with Europe and China, and I think in a sense just want to have something to do with the next hot thing. They can't just sit on their hands and watch this miraculous technology develop. But keeping those regulatory impulses at bay will be, I think, the key factor in maintaining America's AI advantage going forward. AI is a general use technology. While ChatGPT may be the latest kind of version of AI, and it is far more advanced than many of us have encountered before, AI and machine learning have been...
in various elements of a lot of our technology for a while. We just haven't necessarily interacted with them in the same way that we see chat GPT and other generative AIs coming about. When we're thinking about the regulatory framework, particularly for a general use technology like this, I think we have to take that step back and ask, what are the harms we're actually concerned about? Because otherwise you may lead to an overregulation of some of the very beneficial uses and some of the uses that we're already used to, whether it's finding the fastest route through traffic or chatbots that you may use when you go to a customer service line or something like that. And so we have to be very careful that If there are concerns, that we're looking at specific applications or specific harms related to the technology and not wrongly considering all uses of a general purpose technology to be inevitably harmful. I think there's an excess of platform thinking being applied to AI, particularly in this post-2016 peak Facebook environment. When Photoshop came out in the late 90s or early aughts, no one questioned whether Adobe should implement content moderation rules and have people watching how others were using Photoshop. But after the experience with mass centralized...
content distribution platforms, there are expectations that even creative tools which don't have those inbuilt sharing capabilities, if I choose to share something I make with Dolly or ChatGPT, that's my choice, but I'm going out and publishing it. But there's still an expectation that the creative tools themselves should be governed or censored the way a mass social media platform might be. So if battle lines largely are uneven, but they are divided roughly along partisan lines, obviously my big concern has been, well, what if they eventually agree on something? That could be... That could be the worst outcome, that they all agree on some broad set of policies. And Will, you mentioned something earlier that if Congress can't agree, they might agree to delegate to some federal agency, maybe the Federal Trade Commission or someone else, maybe an antitrust agency to...
Make the rules. You shall. It's the Internet version of you shall make the water clean. We're lucky if Congress does the delegation there. What we've seen recently is either through kind of executive orders on competition when it comes to antitrust or through what seems like just agency action in the data privacy space, for example, that the Federal Trade Commission especially has been engaging in a lot of potential regulation or at least notices of.
potential rulemakings around various issues related to technology. So we already have seen them be a very zealous competition enforcer in the sense that they're bringing a lot of antitrust cases against companies which have raised a lot of questions. But beyond that, we've seen them engage in a notice of proposed rulemaking for commercial surveillance, quote unquote, which is really trying to cast a lot of the data practices, many of which are oftentimes benign or even beneficial in a negative light. We're also now seeing them go on and take action regarding non-compete agreements. Again, something that had been traditionally left to the states without a clear congressional mandate. The other area where these questions are being driven down to, as Congress doesn't or can't agree to act, is the state level with state lawmakers making rules and the courts.
which in some cases are taking up challenges to federal laws and the way these technologies have been regulated, and in some cases are hearing novel challenges to new state laws. So both Florida and Texas passed ostensibly anti-censorship bills that really prevent platforms from removing any kind of speech that mentions a political candidate, no matter how nasty or scandalous or false. And these state-level bills are being challenged, not as Section 230 questions, but really just under the straight First Amendment, kind of Miami Herald question of whether or not these platforms have the First Amendment right to pick and choose what content they display. I think the answer is obviously yes, but the courts will, and the Supreme Court will, in the next year or so, end up hearing a challenge to these Texas and Florida laws. It has already heard a challenge to Section 230's application to algorithms.
quite explicitly comes out of a failed lawmaking effort. There were algorithmic accountability bills, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, which would have imposed liability on platforms for algorithmic recommendations. Those didn't go anywhere. And so some of the activists and plaintiffs who've been pushing for that law's passage instead managed to get a case questioning Section 230's application algorithms to the Supreme Court. Thankfully, coming out of oral arguments, it seems as though the court is skeptical to do Congress's job for it and made explicit reference to that.
But nevertheless, these issues are being pushed out to parts of the American government and legal system that aren't necessarily best equipped to handle them in a democratic society. I recently, in my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky, the school system has sued TikTok for alleged harm to children. I'm sorry your school district is wasting money on that that could go to educating your children. If Congress can't seem to agree, at least in the short run on policy, and federal agencies are trying to fill the void, but of course they don't necessarily have the clear authority to do a lot of this, should Congress be focused instead on protecting Americans' information that is allowing them to have more control over it or hardening systems, allowing for robust systems so Americans can do that job themselves? I think there are a couple of different things to take away from that question. The first of which is the
Will mentioned earlier, kind of the European approach to technology policy has always tended to be this more regulatory approach that creates a lot of rules and creates a system where innovators have to go to the government first to seek permission before they take their products to market. One of the advantages of the American system is that it has been much more permissionless. It has been much more focused on allowing if you think there is a market demand for your product and it is not. otherwise illegal for you to be able to put your product on the market and allow people to respond to that. In that way, we have a great flourishing of a large number of platforms that respond to a lot of these kind of questions and demands that we've seen, whether it's conservatives that are concerned about speech and now have other platforms, including Trump's own Truth Social, that they can go to, or whether it's some on the left who have been incredibly concerned about what they've seen Elon Musk do at Twitter and are going to a variety of decentralized platforms. So the market has responded by and large in those ways. When it comes to the question of data itself, I think...
it's often difficult to understand that data does not behave like normal kind of property. It doesn't have that same kind of property rights formulation, which is what makes it very difficult and problematic when you hear phrases like data is the new oil or the prospect of owning your data. I think for many of us on the kind of free market side, it's very attractive to kind of fall into those tendencies because we like property rights. It's easy to define. That being said, one of the areas we have seen states at are in creating these data privacy frameworks that vary greatly and are creating an additional amount of confusion. You also have Europe with its own data privacy framework and a growing number of regulatory bodies.
In the absence of kind of federal proposals to address the concerns about data privacy that many Americans have and establish kind of basic rules of the road for both innovators and consumers, I'm worried that you're going to see this kind of vulcanization of the internet where you'll no longer be able to have the same apps in Kentucky that Virginia has or in California, it's New York, but you'll have such different rules around data that you'll split up one of the great things about the internet, which has been its borderless nature. All of, complying with all of those state rules also gets very, very expensive. And over the past half decade or so in a much lower interest rate environment, I think policymakers could throw out these sorts of suggestions and expect that growing tech platforms could comply with them. You could borrow money pretty cheaply in order to satisfy whatever the new regulatory requirement was. But now we're hitting a situation where these tech platforms are really having to tighten their belts as interest rates have risen.
And so any new obligations, new obligations to moderate that kind of thing, just become so much more expensive for the firm. You already have, say, Twitch cutting its moderation staff this week. It's going to have to rely more on AI. And so now is not the time to be heaping new costly regulations on these firms. The golden goose is weaker than ever. I would say it's not just the cost, though, in terms of financial cost, regardless of what interest rates are. These are huge amounts of man hour cost. When we look at we're nearing the five year anniversary of GDPR, which was Europe's.
data privacy update this summer will have been in effect for five years. We're looking at these state laws, many of which have effective dates this year and more states coming on board. The amount of time that, you know, you're having to have engineers or lawyers spend on complying with various data privacy laws and now checking cross-compliance and everything, it's time that they're not spending on improving content moderation, on improving different elements of data security that they may have identified, on improving the product itself and the user interface because the time is being spent on double-checking compliance, which may or may not be the best solutions for those items. And to say nothing of, you know, if China and Europe are developing rules, it's not, I can't imagine that behooves Americans to look to those countries as role models.
No. And again, I think we often miss that we have a regulatory framework, too. It's not as though we have no rules, we don't have a tort system or laws, but instead ours is just much more biased towards innovation and allowing people to do and create and bring new products to market than we see in other countries. But that's a good thing. And we ought to celebrate that rather than seeing it as some failure to be corrected. And in many ways, particularly the actions we've seen in Europe recently, both around competition policy, but also looking at things like the Digital Services Act, known as the DSA, or the Digital Markets Act, the DMA.
are often targeting these large companies that all happen to be American. So it's kind of an interesting scenario. They couldn't create their own tech companies in part because of the regulatory burden. Now that American tech companies have gone over there and been successful, it feels like at times that they're trying to regulate in a way that would penalize the success of these innovative companies. Those who can't build tax. I can recall when, was it Microsoft, was in antitrust hell in Europe over the bundling of its software products. I mean, has it improved?
What's been interesting is one of the kind of great triumphs of law and economic jurisprudence has been the consumer welfare standard, which really tries to analyze competition in an objective way instead of presuming that big is bad. Europe has always had a different approach to competition policy. But in the U.S., we traditionally tried to, since the 1980s at least, apply this much more objective standard. Right now, both... In some cases in Congress, we saw this last term and it's expected to come back this term. But particularly with recent FTC cases brought against tech companies, we're starting to see what appears to be a shift away from that consumer welfare standard focus to something that would be a more European focus, something that's focusing more on the impact on competitors or on the number of players in a market, which actually does not necessarily...
benefit consumers. We're seeing a lot of attacks on things like mergers and acquisitions, particularly in the tech industry, but also more generally coming out of the FTC that assumes that every company should went to IPO rather than looking at the kind of wide range of exit strategies that different entrepreneurs may have. While much of this attention has been focused on the technology industry, particularly in the congressional debates, We've seen brought up the ability to kind of change these rules to go after other big industries, whether it's big ag or big pharma or kind of whoever the person giving the talk feels is the industry that they are mad at the largest players in, rather than looking at whether or not this is an actual anti-competitive action. And because so many of these new FTC suits focus on very speculative harms down the road, they end up ignoring how the enforcement action harms consumers now or in the next couple of months. When you look at...
Facebook's moves in the metaverse, the incredible amount of money they've spent there, which has had the effect of creating a new industry, new industries in making games in VR that didn't exist before, didn't exist at the size they do now. Creating that market is taken by the FTC as an anti-competitive action against those who might have otherwise created that market. But the whole thing wouldn't exist, or again, wouldn't exist at that scale if Facebook hadn't gotten involved. no one else really seemed willing to. So you're willing to hold off the technology, push it further down the road and keep it away from consumers, all so that the eventual potential competition might be better in some sense. This doesn't seem like a healthy or reasonable way to regulate especially emerging unproven technologies, which we should be happy for anyone throwing money at. And in this way, the courts have again kind of come up. What we've seen is that in many of these, let's say, more attenuated, more creative cases that the FTC has brought against these tech companies, that the courts have, you know,
dismiss them very early or have required the FTC to bring back a different argument or things like that. We're not really seeing a success in the courts because the courts are still looking at that law and economics approach, which is beneficial to consumers. At the same time, even having to defend these cases is incredibly costly, not only to the companies in the sense of the funds that are now being spent on litigation, but going back to that Microsoft example of, are there chilling effects? Are there things that are not happening because companies are so concerned that it may lead to a potential antitrust case and they don't want to spend their time there? Are there things that...
Are there new areas that a company may be ready to launch an innovative product in that they don't want to go into because they're worried about what attention it might draw from competition regulators who we've certainly seen worldwide really have this kind of new zest to go after the tech companies? And I think we should really be concerned about any industry being under that kind of scrutiny if it isn't based in the economics. All right. Will Duffield is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute and Jennifer Huddleston is a research fellow at Cato. You can follow all of their work on these important and emergent issues at our website, Cato.org.
The United States invaded Iraq a full 20 years ago. So what have we learned? At a Cato Institute event marking the grim anniversary, Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia concluded the event with a keynote address. Let me tell you why it's so important that we undertake this effort and then what the undertaking might mean down the road with respect to more broadly questions about war powers.
It was in 2002, in October of 2002, I was the lieutenant governor of Virginia. I had no idea that I would ever run for, much less be in the United States Senate. I had no idea that my then 12-year-old oldest child would end up becoming a Marine infantry officer. But I was listening on National Public Radio to the debate about whether we should go to war with Iraq, whether we should pass the authorization that passed in October of 2002. I assumed that everyone had a lot more knowledge than I did, so I felt like I didn't necessarily have a clear sense of what should happen. But one thing really struck me, and that was it troubled me greatly, and only one senator was bringing this up, Robert Byrd. It troubled me.
greatly that the debate about the Iraq war was happening right before midterm election. No one could explain why October mattered at all. As you'll remember, the invasion didn't happen until March 19. So what was it about October that meant that this war authorization vote had to take place? And it seemed to me that the politics of the midterm election was a dominant, possibly the dominant feature in that debate and vote.
And that worried me greatly. So I became sort of obsessed with the question at that point of, wow, there's got to be a better way to do this to take questions of war more seriously. Started to read about it, again, never knowing I would have an opportunity to do anything. But when Jim Webb, Virginia's senior senator, decided in the middle of his first term that he didn't want to run for re-election, I got into the race, won the seat, asked to be on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees so that I could try to make sense and then hopefully convince some of my colleagues that Congress needed to take... our own powers, war, peace, and diplomacy more seriously and not just abdicate them to executives. Executives do overreach in this space. There's a great history of it. There's a wonderful scene in the first act of Henry V where there's a comical sort of sarcastic discussion about why executives often go to war and often go to war to distract people's attention from things that they don't want to pay attention to. But I don't really blame executives for that. That's sort of what executives do. I really blame Congress. I blame Congresses of both parties and the presidents of both parties for progressively abdicating on this responsibility. And it's not only a responsibility with respect to war and peace, even diplomacy. President Obama
and I was a strong Obama supporter, was negotiating the JCPOA with Iran, which I also supported, but he thought he could do it without Congress. And I wrote a bill with Bob Corker to force him to bring the deal to Congress because he was using congressional sanctions as the negotiating chip. And I said, if you're going to use our sanctions as your negotiating chip, then you can't do a deal without bringing it back to us. Why is it so important at 20 years? You just had a discussion looking at lessons learned, mistakes made. There's so many lessons learned. Why is it important at 20 years to repeal these two authorizations? I think there's four reasons. And then I want to talk about down the road what more we would still need to do. First, we got to...
acknowledge the reality that Iraq is not Ananami, they're a strategic partner. We have two war authorizations against a nation that just like last week Secretary Austin visited, had a really productive set of meetings and press conference with Prime Minister al-Sudani to talk about the need for U.S. and Iraq cooperation, to continue to defeat ISIS or other non-state terrorist organizations that jeopardize Iraq and other nearby nations, but also to provide a check against Iranian aggression in the region. We have about 2,500 troops in Iraq at Iraq's invitation, and Prime Minister al-Sudani wants us to work together. Iraq has become a force not of chaos, but a force of regional stability, and they're getting...
better and better at that. And so we shouldn't have a war authorization against a nation that's now a strategic partner. Iran uses the authorizations to tell Iraq, they're not really your friends. They're pretending to be your friends. But if they were your friends, they wouldn't have war authorizations against you. The Iraqi prime minister, the Iraqi foreign minister, the Iraqi ambassador at the United States have all said that the repeal of these outdated authorizations would be a positive message about a U.S. and Iraqi partnership. So that's the first reason. Let's just recognize the reality that Iraq is no longer an enemy, but is now a partner. Second,
We expect so much of our troops. My oldest son was a Marine infantry commander for eight years who had a couple of deployments. We asked them to do hard things, to risk their lives, you know, bear the burdens of war, see friends that have borne the burdens of war, and they do that. We ought to own our responsibilities. If we're going to ask the troops to bear the really tough burden, then we ought to own our responsibility to not allow wars without votes of Congress, to not hide because war votes are tough, to exercise oversight during wars and ask tough questions. And some of the lessons of the last 20 years are also about oversight or the lack thereof, and I'm sure you talked about that on your panels, but also to declare when wars are over.
That is a congressional responsibility, and if we're going to ask our troops to shoulder the more difficult burden, then we shouldn't shirk the easier burden because these are politically difficult discussions. Third, we should repeal authorizations, the two Iraq authorizations in this case, because an authorization that sits on the books, I call it a zombie authorization, when the purpose has long since been satisfied, is an opportunity for mischief. We want presidents, if they're going to start wars, to come to Congress and ask permission as the framers intended in Article I. But if there are authorizations on the books that were passed for another purpose but are not repealed, you find presidents getting pretty darn creative instead of coming to Congress. Congress, they'll say, well, look, Congress already gave me authority. Why don't I use it? Three presidents, actually four presidents, Bush.
Obama, Trump, and Biden have used the 9-11 authorization, which is short, open-ended, no clear definition of the enemy, no clear definition of geography, no temporal limitation. Four presidents have used that authorization, yes, to target terrorist groups, but often terrorist groups that didn't even exist at the time of 9-11, terrorist groups that may have hostile intent toward nations we like, but have no hostile intent toward the United States. And even those of us who believe that the 9-11 authorization has a continuing utility that needs to be possibly shaped a little bit, we all would acknowledge, everyone would acknowledge, that the 9-11 authorization has been used in places and against organizations. that Congress never would have intended, never would have intended in 2001. So a zombie authorization out on the books that has outlived its life can be an occasion for abuse. The Iraq authorization. President Trump used the 2002 authorization to warrant striking Qasim Soleimani, the head of the IRGC in Iraq. Now, nobody was mad that Soleimani, who did so much damage to US and others over the years, was found and targeted and removed. People weren't upset about that. But to say that...
An authorization, authorizing war against Iraq, was a legal justification for striking and killing an Iranian military leader because he happened to be in Iraq is completely specious. And yet that's what can happen when authorizations sit on the books past the point at which they were necessary. So that's the third reason that we want to remove authorizations, to avoid a president feeling like I can just grab onto this, assert this as a justification legally without coming to Congress and getting a real legal authority for military action with a debate that the American public can see and understand what's at stake. Finally, the last reason to do this, I think, is a powerful one. The U.S., we're so amazing in so many ways. We're not perfect, obviously, but we're an amazing nation in so many ways. Here's something I love about our country. We can turn an enemy into a friend. That's not that easy. There's a biblical phrase in the book of Isaiah to beat a sword into plowshare to turn a spear into a pruning hook. The U.S. has proven an ability, as have other nations.
and in relationship with the United States to turn an enemy into a friend. We waged two wars against Germany in the 20th century. They're a super close ally now, and they're helping us defend Ukraine against an illegal invasion by Russia. Japan, we were at war with Japan. They're a very close ally right now. And Vietnam. Vietnam, we are not partners and allies in Germany and Japan, but that relationship has gotten closer and closer. And now Vietnam requests port visits by the USS John McCain. They want the USS John McCain to visit Vietnam to show that U.S. and Vietnam are partners, which has a way of helping them as they check off against Chinese aggression.
So we have adversaries today in the world, and they're watching what we do. And it's not bad for them to see us repeal an authorization and say, Iraq, you were an enemy, but now Iraq and the United States are partners. We're strategic partners. There is no permanent enemy of the United States, and we have a capacity and a desire. It's a magnanimity, a magnanimity that's shared by other nations, to take a hostile relationship and yet look for a chapter where it can be a good relationship. So these are the reasons why we need to repeal the authorization. Here's what's going to happen, and then I'll just give one other thing down the road, and then Alex and I will converse, and I'd love to take your questions.
The vote today was the cloture vote, and I'm sure you're all like super Senate procedure geeks, right? So this is the vote to allow a debate. So you need 60 votes under current Senate rules to allow a bill to come to the floor for full debate. We got 68, and we had two others who were absent today. So we have 70 votes on this, which is quite bipartisan. This sets up the actual floor debate and amendment process next week. The Democratic and Republican leadership are negotiating with members about amendments, and there ought to be amendments. This is a serious thing. It shouldn't be rushed. I'm glad that it's getting its time where it's the only item on the docket, and we can really spend time on it. I think you'll see probably two kinds of amendments offered.
be focused upon the continuing threat from Iran-backed militias in Iraq. And we're working with Iraq to deal with that threat, but some will want to make plain that by withdrawing an authorization for against Iraq, we're not hampering the United States' ability to defend itself from attacks from Iran-based militias in Iraq. There will be amendments that I think could well be friendly amendments, amendments we could agree on in that space. Second, there are almost always, when we take this up, amendments that are more about stating A president has Article 2 power to do the following. If we're going to assert a legislative power to repeal an authorization, some want to try to define Article 2 power. Now, we can't add to or subtract from Article 2 power in a resolution or statute. It's in the Constitution. And there are some debates about exactly how to phrase Article 2 power. You may see some amendments on that topic next week. We do believe, though, that we'll get to the end of the amendment process. Senator Young and I have agreed to some, you know, we'll probably try to defeat some if they're bad, allow some if they're fine. Some may not be germane. And they will get dealt with in either a tabling motion or a motion to defeat them. But we think we'll get to the end of next week. Some amendments may be accepted.
We'll get this thing passed with right at 70 votes. Our goal then is to go to the House. The House has voted on this already a couple of times with every Democrat and up to 40 Republicans voting to repeal the authorizations, usually as an amendment vote to the House defense bill on the floor of the House. We would like to get the House to take this up as a standalone, not just an amendment on the defense bill. So we've gotten really good House bipartisan support. Barbara Lee and Abigail Spanberger are the two Democratic leads. Chip Roy and Tom Cole are the two Republican leads. They're both very close to Speaker McCarthy. And I would assert to Speaker McCarthy, you are the most important legislator. You're number three in presidential succession, president, VP, speaker. This is a bill that's ultimately about reclaiming Article I powers that have been advocated to the Article II branch. So this would be a good thing for a speaker to do. Now, whether or not he will vote for it or not, maybe he'll see the merits of a...
assertion of legislative prerogatives and agree with us that taking this up coincident with the 20th anniversary is a good idea. Last thing I'll say is President Biden put out a statement today that was a a restatement of what he had done when we took this bill up in the 117th Congress saying, I will support this bill. If it comes to my desk, I'll sign it. And the wording of it was interesting. He talked about we need to repeal this because Iraq is a security partner now, not an enemy. But he also said there's other war authorizations on the books. 2001, he didn't mention it by name, but he talked about war authorizations to deal with non-state terrorism threats. And he said, we look forward to working with Congress to take those off to that authorization, which is still necessary because non-state terrorist organizations still pose a threat. But after 20 plus years, it needs some revision and shaping. And he pledged to work together with Congress to do that. So we'll take about, when this bill passes out of the House, God willing,
Todd and I will take one day off. Then we're going to start working on 9-11 revisions and rewrite rights. And I bet Cato and Cato's friends will have ideas on that, too. Look forward to working together. Thank you. Tim Kaine is a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia. The United States has expansive goals in Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific and spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on defense. Yet the strategy is still arguably insolvent. Former acting defense secretary Chris Miller argues that the defense budget should be cut dramatically to support a fundamentally different grand strategy. Miller sat down with Cato's Justin Logan in April.
So that's the thesis of my book. Really, the thesis is accountability as well. I get so upset like we have lost. We have lost two wars and people still get promoted. And, you know.
I'm sorry. I'm like a quasi-wannabe historian. But if you're a military person, you read a lot. And you read about Marshall and, of course, the defining event of the United States military. Well, Civil War and World War II. And Marshall would be like keeping scorecard. Okay, I've got six. Well, they probably, I think you have like 68 generals. Now we have how many? Like 500? They had a 16 million person military, by the way. And, you know, Marshall had everybody's name on the list. He's like, not working. Fire him. Like failed in crossing.
crossing the Salerno or whatever. That river was Rapidian, or I pronounced it wrong. It'll be great. That'll be meme-worthy. The guy doesn't know how to pronounce the river. And there was accountability, right? And the thing that has really frustrated me, and you brought it up, is the fact that...
We have not drawn on these experiences. I was trained in, it was embedded in me about after action reviews and lessons learned. Always try to improve your performance. People out here nodding their head going, remember those after action reviews? It was Maoist self-criticism sessions, wasn't it? It was brutal. But man, you opened up a way to talk about things without risk of hurting anybody's feelings because it was organized that way. And I haven't seen it yet. We still don't have lessons learned from the Iraq war.
We still don't have Afghanistan. They've been done. I'm telling you they've been done because I got interviewed for them. So why that disgusts me that they're still being withheld because we have to give the next generation the tools. I cannot believe we did it again. I was trained by Vietnam vets. They're like, we're never going to do this again. I was like, no, we're not doing it again. And then we did it again. We did it again.
We walk away. And so that's kind of the thesis of the book. But you want to talk budget, man. Let's talk budget. Let's talk budget. So I think one, you know, you look, and this is a short book. It's a memoir. It's very readable, if I haven't mentioned that already. But, you know, you say 40 to 50 percent. It takes us back to sort of pre-9-11 numbers. So it's not, you know, just sort of rolling up the entire military and becoming Costa Rica overnight. And the natural response to that is to say, well, you just pull this 40, 50 percent out of thin air. And I think as a practical matter, if you had political leadership that said we want to cut the budget dramatically, they would go to PPB&E or wherever in the Pentagon and say, hey, guys, we're cutting the budget by X. Figure it out. There's no one person who's going to.
every dot and tittle of the org chart to say we've cut it by. So I think it's like the obvious criticism is superficially persuasive, but in practical matter of precedent. I had to be provocative to sell books, man. You did it. You did it. You're here. So let's talk a little bit about...
Service shares, right? So we have more or less fixed service shares over time, which tells us something. Since time immemorial. Since the establishment of the Department of Defense, my friend. So we are going to run a new look defense posture in Europe. And after that, the service shares stay the same. We're going to run a big counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan and somehow miraculously in the Air Force and the Navy come out OK in this. And a lot of people would say this is a pathology of Goldwater-Nichols, that jointness in fighting wars is great. But jointness in budgeting for wars is actually bad, because you get this log-rolled coalition where the services and the combatant commands, which is another bugbear of yours, I think it's fair to say, don't.
fight over budgetary shares. So do you have a story where, is that a part of the problem in your view, and how do we undo that problem? Well, that's like a huge question about transformation and innovation. But yeah, number one, the geographic combat commanders, there are five of them, the world split up into five regions, was brilliant when Colin Powell and Weinberger and all those invented, or put that structure in place, because we were in a war period, right? It was like nothing much is going on.
And, you know, let's be honest. And so it was the right construct at the time. And when was Goldwater-Nichols? 87, 88, 87. So I thought they were really, and that's exactly what we need right now. We need somebody thinking strategically. Your point about, like, all right, how do you cut the budget? There's two ways. Capability space or salami slice. Capability space is you come up with a new strategy and you go, well, clearly we don't need that many, you know, army divisions.
Because we're going to be a maritime strategy, which I think there's a lot to that. So get rid of some army forces. But it never happens. So I'm a strict proponent of the salami slice. And everybody laughs at me and yells at me when I say that. You just have to give everybody their bogey. Because who was it? It was Andy Grover, somebody, some business person. So there's always 15% in every single organization you can get rid of. So that forces that drawdown. But the point is, I'm like, we have so much overhead right now in our military. And I'm good with overhead and kludging everything up.
When it's in the best interest to slow down, because the military, we got a mission, we go. It's good to have civilian oversight to slow them down. Otherwise, because every problem, if you have a hammer, every problem's a nail, whatever that is. We have so much overhead right now with the military. I'm like, in World War II, how many major commands do we have? Two, Europe, Pacific, East, West. I'm like, why can't we go back to something like that, which then will clean up your strategic stuff? Because right now you have five four-star generals all competing. I'll give you an example.
How many aircraft carrier can we put to sea at any one time? We have 12 of them. Usually two. You can surge to three. Oh, no, we can go to five. If you go to five aircraft carriers at one time, you will destroy the crewing. You will have a nightmare in your personnel process because we don't have enough people to man that many carriers. And you'll absolutely mess up your maintenance schedule to an unbelievable degree. So usually we put two out at a time.
You can surge to three. Those two aircraft carriers are like, those four-star generals and admirals, they fight over those things as if it's like the last piece of food. So if you have two commands, I think it will just rationalize how we think about the world as opposed to five fiefdoms or pro-councils. There was a book about that. So that's the point I was trying to make. But back to your point about like, okay, geez, everybody gets the same percentage of the budget. What do you think trade space is? About two and a half percent? Like Air Force is up a little right now and Army's down.
I should go consult for the Army because I can solve their problem. I'm not on their Christmas card list right now. Chris Miller was the acting defense secretary for the United States at the end of the Trump administration. The COVID-19 pandemic upended our daily lives. The crisis was not only an unprecedented shock to our health care system, but also a threat to our economic well-being, including our mortgage and housing markets. Despite the reforms following the 2008 financial crisis, markets were not prepared, and March of 2020 brought another financial crisis. When he was the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Mark Calabria led a considerable part of the response to the 2020 crisis. In his new book, Shelter from the Storm, he tells the story of how millions of families were provided with mortgage and rental assistance, both to keep them safe and to keep financial markets functioning without harming taxpayers. He spoke at the Cato Institute in March.
And one of the things that I will say is that Mark and I were actually both staffers on the Senate Banking Committee, not at the same time. And we went through a lot of history, a lot of crises with that type of role. You know, I was at the FHA, you were at the FHFA. I felt like in those roles, you didn't have a guidebook. I felt like it would have been nice if someone had written a story like Mark that I could have read. So Mark, I want to ask you a question. If you had to pick one chapter of the book to read.
What would that chapter be? And what's your favorite chapter? Wow. I mean, there are so many, but I think it starts from where one is coming from. So for instance, it's a chapter on leading a federal agency that I think applies regardless of whether you're a financial regulator or you're at DOJ or HHS or any other agency. And kind of that kind of advice of how to bring an agency together, especially one that may have morale problems when you walk in the door, and how do you set it in a certain direction? So the leadership skills have often said, you know, again, Dana and I both worked in the Senate Banking Committee. We both went through Senate confirmations, but we also worked on Senate confirmations.
And it's just a sad reflection that leadership skills and management skills almost never come up instead of confirmations. And they probably should. And I wish that someone had kind of had that guidebook for me. So one purpose of the book was writing to an audience of if you find yourself in this seat someday yourself, here's some advice that I found useful. And of course, there's the historical documentation of what we did in the crisis that I think is critical for responding to crises in general. But there are a lot of what I would call public administration, good government lessons in the book that I think can be taken outside of financial services sphere and you really used anywhere.
That makes sense. And I'm going to come back to the crisis. But since we kind of went there, what sort of challenges did you face when you started at FHFA? And we had a unique set of issues. And as a reminder, FHFA, Federal Housing Finance Agency, regulates Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Federal Home Loan Banks. Fannie and Freddie have been in conservatorship, which is, for those of you who don't have administrative bankruptcy, since 2008.
constantly debated as what is their future going to be. Part of that conversation is, well, what's the future of the agency that regulates them? So you're walking into an agency where people aren't even really sure whether that agency itself will be around in the future. They're not sure what the entities they regulate are going to be around in the future. Without going into too much detail, we inherited a little bit of a scandal from my predecessor, and that's talked about a little bit in the book.
Very big morale problems, division within the agency, lack of direction. And to me, it was one of the reasons to tell that story in the book is I don't think we could have had the successful response we had to COVID if we had not immediately dealt with the morale problems and lack of direction at the agency. Because you needed to get people on board with a sense of direction and a sense of purpose. And, you know, oddly enough, in some sense, this applies to Fannie and Freddie as well. That message of the book is you can really animate a bureaucracy if you've got a purpose that they know what they're guiding at. Like one of the problems with Fannie and Freddie on a day-to-day basis is they don't really know why they're there.
I mean, it's kind of to make money, to help lenders make money. But I really kind of saw them rise to the occasion in COVID when they were given a focus on your mission is helping keep people in their homes during a pandemic. And so I do credit them. Don't worry, there's plenty of probably criticism of them in the book as well. But there is a nod with how you can focus them. And I was just so impressed with the agency to coming together and focusing on a purpose. So it really, one lesson, leadership across.
you know, organizations, not just agencies, but organizations, is you have to articulate a very clear purpose. And then you have to repeat it ad nauseum. And so everybody within the agency kind of repeats it back to you. But really the power of that and some of the other leadership lessons and how you can get things moving in the right direction. Also note, we're here at Cato. You know, I forgot my pocket constitution today, but everybody can get their Cato pocket constitution. I raised that to say how much we love the constitution here. Ian, one of the things I talk about in the book is how you can really animate an agency by really grounding it in its statute. And, you know, this is our purpose. This is what Congress has given us to do.
And, you know, Dana touched upon this, but, you know, I was on the Senate Banking Committee in 2008, and a lot of the book is the lessons I took away from, you know, what I thought was done correctly, what I thought was done incorrectly, but also as someone who conducted oversight of agencies, I looked at this and said, you know, I want to correct the things that I was frustrated with. I mean, to give a little example of this that people with Inside Washington will get, on most of my initial visits with members of Congress, which is what you do once you get appointed, you go visit with your oversight committees, and I would tell members of Congress, and I worked up here, and let me tell you, I shared the frustration of waiting six months to have a letter return to tell me nothing. Absolutely. That happens? Yeah, crazy. We'll answer you in two years. So every time I would visit with a member, I said, I commit to you today. If I'm going to tell you nothing, I'm going to tell you right away. But I'm going to try to actually answer your question as well and do it on a timely basis. And just that kind of what I think a good regulator should be. And it's very bipartisan. It's made to surprise some. But I really took a lot of the inspiration from how I approached being a financial regulator from being on the banking committee when Paul Sarbanes chaired it.
and what he said a financial regulator should be. And that's what we tried to do at FHFA, was do kind of that vision of what Paul Sarbanes and Richard Shelby had set up for what a financial regulator, how they should behave and how they should do their job. Mark Calabria was the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency during the Trump administration. He is currently a senior advisor at the Cato Institute. When we think of abuses of executive power, it's natural to think about matters of war, but executive power extends to the entire administrative apparatus. And there are loopholes, and they allow the executive branch to remain relatively less accountable. Cato's Tommy Berry details the federal laws that govern who governs and how they ought to change for this Cato Audio exclusive. Executive power has many facets. One of those is control and oversight of all of the agencies that over...
you know, 200 plus years Congress has created to do various functions within the federal government. How does Congress exert its oversight, which I think we would all agree, not we all, there's only two of us in the room, the two of us might agree that Congress doesn't do a great job with oversight and they should do better and they should empower themselves to do a better job doing oversight. So how does that function at present? So in theory, the framers designed Senate confirmation process to be one of the key checks on the executive branch. This was a compromise at the framing of the Constitution between two groups, one of which thought the president alone should get to pick everyone who staffs his executive branch without any interference or any second guessing, another group who thought that's way too much power to put in one person. So the compromise was the president would get the first pick, but it wouldn't be official until the Senate reviewed, vetted, and ultimately confirmed those picks for the executive branch. So in theory, the Senate...
remains both accountable for the high-level operators in the executive branch by virtue of having vetted and confirmed them, and also serves that checking and supervision role of saying if someone is not qualified, then we're going to vote them down. In practice, though, several loopholes have developed over the years that the executive branch has found, both through statutes and through questionable constitutional interpretations, that allows a lot of high-functioning, high-level executive branch employees to have never been vetted or confirmed by the Senate. All right, so high-level executive branch employees never confirmed by the Senate. Mark Calabria, our colleague, described this process to me and said it was thorough. And yet there are these ways for the White House to circumvent the checks that were built into our system. That's right. And the thoroughness or the length of time it takes to appoint someone is one of the excuses you'll often hear for why it needs to be circumvented in certain situations. So the key statute here is called the Vacancies Act. And this was passed.
essentially because of the notion that this was a problem, that if a vacancy opened unexpectedly in an important office, you didn't want to wait the six months, nine months, a year it might take to vet and confirm someone to go through that grueling process. So the statute basically says someone can temporarily fill it as an acting officer. The problem, though, is that we have the Constitution, and the Constitution says that principal officers have to be confirmed by the Senate full stop. There's no acting officer exception. So if an acting, say, attorney general or an acting secretary of state is a principal officer in the constitutional sense, then using the Vacancies Act to appoint an acting attorney general without Senate consent is unconstitutional. And how would one go about challenging that?
Well, there's the rub. So some people did challenge this, especially when Matthew Whitaker was appointed acting attorney general, having never been confirmed by the Senate to that office, nor to any other office during the Trump administration. But the problem is, some people challenged various rules he'd issued. But by the time those challenges worked their way up to the appeals courts, a new attorney general, Senate confirmed, had been in office, Bill Barr, and he purported to ratify essentially everything that Matthew Whitaker did, or at least everything that was challenged. And courts have accepted that. And a big problem with that is that when a court accepts so-called post hoc ratification, they say, not only is this rule now fine, we don't even have to reach the constitutional question. And so that's essentially stunting the development.
of appointments clause doctrine in the courts. Okay, so how should the Senate and how should courts behave with respect to that problem? Because, I mean, the problem is clear enough. You have a rule that is issued by a high-level appointee of the president who has not been Senate confirmed. Those rules are null and void as far as you or I would be concerned. And so how should Congress and courts react?
Well, Congress can fix it literally with one sentence if it wanted to, and I think it should. So we have the Administrative Procedure Act, which is kind of the omnibus, all-powerful act that sets out the ground rules for issuing any type of rule. You could add one sentence to that that says a rule shall be null and void unless issued by a Senate-confirmed officer. And in an instant, that would say that, okay, if you're an acting officer who wasn't Senate-confirmed, you can't issue a rule. And also, if you were subdelegated power by a superior, if you're a relatively low-ranking official who has been subdelegated powers just by virtue of a superior's say-so, you can't be authorized to issue a rule. And so that would supersede any uses of the Vacancies Act and any uses of subdelegation.
branch attempts. And it wouldn't put a straitjacket on the executive branch. There are still lots of Senate-confirmed officials. It would simply require one of those officials to take accountability for every rule that's issued. All that aside, there are still other ways for the executive branch to evade oversight in this way.
That's right. So when Congress passed the Vacancies Act, it was a compromise. And they said, all right, we'll allow people in these offices in limited times, but we'll put a time limit on it specifically to incentivize a permanent nominee to eventually be put forward for Senate consideration. But the problem is the executive branch has found a loophole to that too. There's text in the act that basically says an action is null and void if it performed a performance of the function and duty of an office by an invalid acting officer, say by an acting officer who stayed past his time limit. But then it defines function or duty very narrowly. It says that it's only a function or duty that's exclusive to that office. And so what the executive branch realized is that if they can simply argue, oh, this isn't exclusive because...
In theory, it could be subdelegated. Then they can say, oh, the Vacancies Act doesn't apply to this power. And what's gradually happened is the executive branch has made more and more aggressive arguments that virtually every power of virtually every office is hypothetically subdelegable and therefore exempt from this enforcement mechanism in the Vacancies Act. So what you see now is the 210-day time limit in the Vacancies Act runs out. But instead of the acting officer stopping, they just change their title literally on the website. One day it'll say acting officer. The next day it will say deputy officer performing the functions and duties of blank office. And they'll say, oh, he's no longer an acting officer under the Vacancies Act. He's now simply performing.
all the non-exclusive functions and duties, which just happen to be all the functions and duties. So the way to fix this is essentially for Congress to get rid of this really narrow definition of function and duty, get rid of this exception for delegable duties, and just say, no, any action taken that's the performance of any duty of an office is null and void once the time limit runs out. Because the time limit is pretty generous in itself, and there's really no reason for the executive branch to be constantly missing it. It seems like all of these various loopholes that have been discovered by the executive branch, it seems like it's just bad faith all the way down. Certainly. And it's from both parties and it's been going back for decades. It's a constant tug of war between the Senate and between the presidency. And you can understand the presidency doesn't want to go through the hassle and the political accountability and the occasional negative answer from the Senate. But the framers designed it to be a difficult process. It wasn't everything the executive branch is supposed to do isn't supposed to be easy. So at some point, the Congress, the Senate and the House has to step up and protect its own prerogative. And hopefully, once we've reached a point where both parties have been on the wrong side of this, have seen presidents of the other party just push.
acting officers through without any accountability, hopefully eventually we'll reach a compromise where both parties see what's wrong with this. That is certainly easier said than done because once a president of one party... is replaced by a president of the other party, they see the benefits. Yes, for sure. So the party in the presidency always likes it and the party out of the presidency always dislikes it. So to some extent, this is one of those rare issues that has to be less about party and more about the prerogative of branches of government. For the most part, alliances these days are about party, not about branch of government. But for a few specific issues, you can actually have Congress, the congressional branch versus the executive branch, which is really what the framers thought would be more common in our system of checks and balances. And we saw, we did see reform in 1998. The Vacancies Act was reformed to try to cut.
closed some of these loopholes. It wasn't entirely successful in the drafting, but at least the political will was achieved. And so I think that should be a model for reform in the future. And you've done work on this regarding Senate confirmation of officers of the executive branch. These are people, when they have the powers of that officer, they can impact average American's lives in myriad ways with great impact.
Absolutely. I did a study at the Pacific Legal Foundation a few years ago that looked at over hundreds of just within the Department of Health and Human Services rules approving various drugs, taking drugs off the market, various things that affect people's lives. There have been Department of Justice officials who are not Senate-confirmed, who are making prosecution decisions, who are deciding to prosecute or not prosecute people. That has a huge effect on people's lives. So this isn't just a sort of hypothetical problem, as the Supreme Court has said. This is a real ...
key mechanism of accountability. Because if you have a senator who confirmed or didn't confirm a particular officer, you can blame or praise that senator. But if you don't, then there's no democratic accountability. Is there anything in your mind that would very clearly push this issue back onto the plates of members of Congress? That's a great question. I thought it might with the Matthew Whitaker incident, and it felt like we came close, but then just as usual, people got distracted and moved on to the next thing. I think you would really have to see perhaps even more aggressive use of this loophole, especially in the middle of a presidency when there's really no excuse not to use someone Senate confirmed in a position. So with Matthew Whitaker, there were several Senate confirmed options. President Trump could have chosen to be acting attorney general, but he didn't choose any of them. If we see Biden, say, do a similar thing for an important cabinet official, then I think you'll have attention once again to this notion of really...
The president could pick literally anyone from the executive branch to fill the top job in any given department. And that's just a dangerous power for him to have. Tommy Berry is editor-in-chief of the Cato Institute's annual Supreme Court Review. The eighth annual Human Freedom Index, co-published with the Fraser Institute, presents a global measurement of personal, civil, and economic freedom in 165 countries for 2020, the most recent year for which data are available. The coronavirus pandemic was calamitous for human freedom. From 2019 to 2020, 94% of the world's population saw a fall in overall freedom, including significant declines in the rule of law and freedom of movement, expression, association, and assembly, and the freedom to trade. Find out how the U.S. ranks and learn more about the state of human freedom across the globe at www.cato.org. That will do it for this edition of Cato Audio.
I'm Caleb Brown, talk to you again next month.