Today is the 30^th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day and, as the Washington Post points out, “there seems little to celebrate.” Indeed, press freedom has been on a years-long decline around the world and the situation is getting worse. The number of journalists imprisoned hit a record last year according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and in their annual survey of press freedom, Reporters Without Borders finds that “the environment for journalism is ‘bad’ in seven out of ten countries, and satisfactory in only three out of ten.”

Our findings in the Human Freedom Index also document the long-term decline of global freedom of expression.

It is the category of freedom that saw the largest decline in the past two decades, besides freedom of movement, which was suddenly and dramatically affected by the COVID pandemic. The fall in free expression is part of what free speech scholars such as Jacob Mchangama have called a global free speech recession. That recession includes rich and poor countries, democracies and non-democracies, and every region of the world.

The greatest violations have come from autocracies, but free speech is also coming under threat in liberal democracies. That includes, significantly, the threat to the culture of free speech that is harmful in itself and is inevitably upstream from the law as Mchangama and Greg Lukianoff have pointed out. Relatively free societies should be especially on guard against that kind of intolerance.

I take this occasion to highlight the case of Jimmy Lai, publisher of the now-closed Apple Daily and currently in jail in Hong Kong. We at Cato are honored to award him the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. (Read more about Jimmy Lai’s fight for Hong Kong’s freedoms and the award ceremony on May 18 here.) The fall in freedom of expression in Hong Kong has indeed been dramatic (see graph) with Jimmy Lai being one of thirteen media people currently imprisoned there. Their persecution, and that of other journalists around the world, is a vivid reminder of what’s at stake, as Cato Letter No. 15 eloquently put it:

“Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them.”

Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the Farm Bill this year, the largest part of which is the $127 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP, or food stamp, program is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It was created in 1964 to improve nutrition for low-income families, but the economic situation and food consumption of such families has greatly changed since then.

Cato’s John Early and colleagues have described how real levels of poverty in America have plunged over the decades. One change has been food consumption. Chart 1 shows that calories have risen substantially for Americans since the 1970s, including low-income Americans. The USDA data is the average daily intake for age two and above, and low income means individuals with incomes of less than 186 percent of the poverty level.

Today, many Americans at all income levels are eating too much food, including too much unhealthy food, and they are gaining excess weight. The main food-related health problem for low-income Americans today is obesity, not hunger.

Chart 2 shows that low-income adults and children have higher obesity rates than other Americans. SNAP was originally aimed at alleviating food shortfalls, but many low-income individuals today are eating too much of the wrong foods. In the CDC data for the chart, adults are age twenty and over and children are age two to 19. Low income means individuals with incomes of less than 130 percent of the poverty level.

There are many unresolved issues in low-income nutrition. Why do SNAP recipients have less healthy diets than others? Which foods cause obesity? Are “food deserts” an important problem? How can people be encouraged to eat better?

Complex nutrition problems likely won’t be solved by one-size-fits-all solutions from Washington. Indeed, federal interventions are often flawed, and because they are imposed nationally can generate widespread harm. The imposition of arguably faulty federal dietary guidelines is an example.

Another example is SNAP, which has also had broad—and perhaps partly negative—effects on diets. The USDA says that the program is supposed to provide “nutrition benefits,” “healthy food,” and “healthy eating patterns.” But about 23 percent of SNAP benefits are for junk food including sugary drinks, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar.

The N in SNAP is for nutrition, but studies have found the opposite. One USDA study found that “lower nutritional quality of household food acquisitions was associated with SNAP participation status.” A recent review by Jerold Mande and Grace Flaherty found, “Children participating in SNAP were more likely to have elevated disease risk and consume more sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), more high-fat dairy, and more processed meats than income-eligible nonparticipants.” The USDA has found that SNAP recipients are more obese than similar-income nonrecipients.

Because SNAP is a rigid top-down program, it has likely displaced alternative, and perhaps better, solutions for low-income nutrition. The federal government, for example, has repeatedly denied city and state requests to withdraw SNAP subsidies from soft drinks and candy, as discussed by Nicole Negowetti. The nutrition case against sugary soft drinks is clear-cut as Negowetti notes, but they are the single largest purchase item in SNAP. The USDA advises against sugary drinks, but its own SNAP program subsidizes them.

People can buy foods they want with their own money. But when taxpayers are paying $127 billion a year for a program that does not produce the outcomes promised, it is time to reevaluate. Congress should perform a thorough review of SNAP’s nutrition failures as it reconsiders the Farm Bill this year.

I recommend that Congress devolve SNAP funding and administration to the states, allowing for a diversity of policy approaches. Low-income nutrition involves many uncertainties, so imposing a single national policy does not make sense. With devolution, states could try different rules for allowable purchases, work requirements, benefit levels, and other program features. That approach would generate information about what works best for recipients, taxpayers, nutrition, and the economy.

More on SNAP, nutrition, and obesity here, here, here, here, and here.

Data Note: Obesity for adults means a BMI of 30 or more. Thus, an average‐​height man of 5’ 9” is obese if he weighs more than 203 pounds. Obesity is a higher weight category than overweight, which is BMI 25 to 30.

Federal, state, and local governments are being called upon to support struggling transit agencies to meet climate change goals. But spending money on transit is not necessarily the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In most of the United States, people are reluctant to or unable to use trains and buses to get to the destinations that matter to them. As a result, per rider operating and capital costs are quite high for many systems.

Faltering Ridership

Ridership data from reports compiled by the American Public Transit Association shows that passenger trips peaked in 2014 at 10.7 billion. By 2019, ridership had fallen 8% to 9.9 billion. It then cratered during the pandemic and recovered modestly in 2022.

To better chart Americans’ propensity to use public transit, I divided the ridership totals by annual population estimates published by USAFacts. Per capita transit use peaked at 35 rides per US resident in 2008 (a year of unusually high gas prices) and had fallen to just over thirty rides per resident prior to the pandemic. In 2022, ridership remained below 19 trips per resident.

Given longer term trends, it seems likely that total transit utilization will never return to 2019 levels, and that once they have reached a post-pandemic equilibrium, should not be expected to grow, at least on a per capita basis.

High-Cost Systems

The Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database (NTD) contains operating cost data by system but is provided on a lagged basis. For fiscal year 2021, NTD data shows aggregate operating expenses of $47.4 billion or $10.87 per passenger of which only $1.40 were covered by fares, yielding a farebox recovery ratio of 12.9%.

Because FY 2021 (which, depending on the transit provider, may contain several months from calendar year 2020) represented a ridership trough, we should expect costs per passenger and farebox recoveries to improve substantially in FY 2022 and 2023.

But NTD’s operating cost data does not incorporate the full cost of transporting passengers. And once we move beyond the Northeast and Chicago, overall costs per passenger can reach very high levels.

An example is the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. NTD data for 2021 show $633 million in operating expenses, 18 million trips, and a cost per trip of $35.46. But BART’s 2021 audited financial statement shows $1.175 billion in operating expenses implying a cost per trip of $65.86. Among the costs included in the financial report but excluded by NTD is depreciation.

In the more normal year of FY 2022, BART had operating expenses of $1.226 billion (per its 2022 audit) and 38 million trips yielding a fully loaded cost per trip of $32.07.

Smaller rail systems can have even higher costs per trip. An example is Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART), which runs trains between Sonoma County Airport and the ferry terminal in Larkspur, CA. In FY 2022, its audit showed operating expenses of $48 million covering 354 thousand trips, thus yielding a cost per trip of $134.74.

Expensive Capital Projects

Adding riders by extending transit systems is a costly exercise that may not make financial or climate sense. Larger projects such as the Second Avenue Subway (costing $4.6 billion) and Grand Central Madison ($12 billion) have been thoroughly examined. But projects outside the Northeast promise to yield even worse results.

In Santa Clara County, the Valley Transit Authority (VTA) has raised $530 million to extend a light-rail line 2.4 miles and make related improvements. Projected daily boardings across the three stations served by the station are expected to reach 4,534 by the year 2043. But even this paltry ridership figure is misleading.

As we learn from Table 18 of VTA’s Supplementary Transportation Analysis, there would still be 2,322 boardings at the current terminal station, Alum Rock, if the extension was not built. Further, 896 of the projected light rail boardings would be from bus riders switching to the new transit mode. So, on net, this $530 million light-rail extension is expected to add only 1,316 daily transit rides.

Finally, these ridership projections were developed before the pandemic and do not appear to have been updated since. Given the sharp decline in VTA light rail ridership since early 2020, an updated forecast would likely show fewer than a thousand added rides daily. A subset of those would replace car trips.

Spending over half a billion dollars to replace just a few hundred car trips per day is an inefficient way to save the planet. Assuming, generously, that the light-rail extension would replace a thousand car trips daily and that the infrastructure has a useful life of forty years, the capital cost per car trip replaced would be over $36,000, enough to buy everyone an electric vehicle!

Alternatives

Continued large transit investments are unlikely to replace a substantial proportion of gasoline-powered car trips and the greenhouse gas emissions they cause. Policymakers concerned about the transportation sector’s impact on climate change should consider more cost-effective alternatives.

For example, if more people live within a short distance of shopping, dining, and entertainment activities, they may choose walking or biking over driving. One way to shorten travel lengths is to relax zoning laws to encourage mixed use development.

Meanwhile, car buyers are increasingly choosing electric vehicles. In January 2023, electric vehicles accounted for seven percent of US auto sales. The Inflation Reduction Act’s EV tax credits are contributing to the demand for these vehicles. But the credits are limited to vehicles whose final assembly is in North America. If car buyers could also use the credits for often-cheaper EVs imported from overseas, they would be more likely to choose an EV over internal combustion vehicles (for EVs to be an effective climate solution sufficient clean electricity needs to be available and greenhouse gas emissions during the EV production process should be limited).

Finally, cities can reduce idling at intersections by introducing smart traffic lights that change based on the flow of traffic rather than at fixed intervals. The Department of Energy has estimated that eliminating unnecessary idling “would be the same as taking 5 million vehicles off the roads”.

With all this said, transit can make sense in densely populated cities like New York and Chicago where infrastructure has already been built and operating costs per rider are relatively low. But transit does not work everywhere, and policymakers should be cautious about relying on it as a universal climate solution.

In the evolving post-Dobbs policy equilibrium, many Republican policymakers are looking for new policies to support mothers and children. Among other things, these policymakers are concerned with ensuring that mothers are adequately supported before and after birth. Policymakers are also worried that some mothers affected by the Dobbs decision and resulting policies will have limited resources to meet their babies’ needs.

These concerns are understandable. Although estimates vary, some suggest that the Dobbs ruling will result in a four percent increase in U.S. births. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a majority of women that received an abortion pre-Dobbs were living below the poverty line, about half were single, and a third were cohabitating with a partner. It seems likely that more women giving birth after Dobbs will be looking for help than before the Dobbs decision.

In an effort to respond to these issues, and in an effort to appear more pro-family (as opposed to simply pro-life), Republican policymakers have proposed various policies which expand the scope of government. Recently, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee expanded Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and proposed covering two years’ worth of baby diapers. Oklahoma’s Governor Kevin Stitt has proposed expanding government-funded fatherhood programs. And federal policy makers Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney introduced a bill to provide monthly cash benefits to families last year.

Policymakers sometimes forget that there are alternative ways to support families outside of creating new programs or expanding spending. In general, there are a wide variety of reforms that could increase affordability and make life easier for families that cost nothing at all. For pregnancy and childbirth specifically, it is also possible to increase support for single mothers by increasing accountability for noncustodial fathers.

One option is to require non-custodial fathers to absorb a greater portion of the costs associated with pregnancy and childbirth. With this in mind, Virginia policymakers recently passed a bill that would allow single mothers to request monthly child support and reimbursement for pregnancy and delivery-related costs from their child’s legal father. Specifically, the legislation would assign “the mother’s unreimbursed pregnancy and delivery expenses and those reasonable expenses incurred by either parent for the benefit of the child prior to the birth of the child” to the legal parents based on their gross incomes. This policy essentially extends the concept of child support to pre-birth and birth expenses.

Virginia’s law is not the first of its kind, and two other red states have passed similar legislation: Utah was the first state to pass a law requiring fathers to pay half of a mother’s pregnancy-related medical costs in 2021 and South Dakota passed a similar law earlier this year. Legislators in Arkansas have likewise proposed legislation requiring biological fathers to pay half of pregnancy-related medical costs. And last year, federal policymakers introduced legislation that would allow pregnant mothers to receive child support.

The concept is seemingly popular across party lines. In a weighted survey conducted by YouGov that asked about extending child support payments to the time of conception, 47 percent of respondents supported the hypothetical law and 28 percent opposed it. Despite the legislation so far being proposed by Republican policymakers, the law was favored most strongly by Democrats, especially Democratic women (61 percent in favor, 16 percent oppose) compared with any other group in the survey.

In a perfect world, it would not be necessary to require fathers to pay for child support. But child support payments deal with the financial reality that single mothers face in the absence of a committed and financially supportive partner. They help apportion child-related costs among parents when a preexisting agreement does not exist. Moreover, it seems reasonable to require fathers to absorb some of the cost of pregnancy and childbirth, given that women living in places with more restrictive abortion laws will be expected to do the same.

Policymakers should think clearly about the exact problem they are attempting to solve with any new law and be careful to consider potential unintended consequences when passing legislation in a delicate policy area. Still, Virginia’s law and those like it seem like an improvement on alternatives and a step in the direction of increasing both accountability and support.

The latest 8^th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) civics and U.S. history scores are out, and they have been dropping since 2014. This will no doubt spur lamentations about the state of our kids and our democracy, and, all things equal, we should want to see scores on these tests going up rather than down. But maybe the situation isn’t as dire as it might seem.

As with all NAEP scores, there is a limit to what we can determine about the state of American education from them (especially in a hot take like this blog post). But it might be worth considering a simple proposition: we have seen drops in NAEP scores since 2013 and 2014 (depending on the years of test administration) because the No Child Left Behind Act heavily emphasized standardized testing and was replaced by the much less test-centric Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Maybe standardized testing has just become less of an emphasis since NCLB.

The following charts of various NAEP tests all show peaks around 2013–2014.

U.S. history

Civics (Peak in 2014, though the drop by 2018 was not statistically different)

Math (Most recent results from 2022)

Reading (Also most recent 2022)

Of course, changing federal policy is not the only factor in scores – state policies, local policies, changing culture, economic conditions, and much more are at play. And it is quite likely that both COVID-19 learning disruption, and the increasing political and social radioactivity of history and civics, are at work. But looking at several subjects, and just applying a little Occam’s razor, this seems like a pretty reasonable suspect.

Perhaps the big policy question is whether falling standardized test scores should lead to major education policy revisions. I think the answer is no.

For one thing, as I touched on briefly in writing about the boom in universal school choice, there is some evidence that standardized test scores are poor predictors of outcomes we’d like to see from education, such as higher lifetime earnings and better health. It might also be that students simply do not care about NAEP – it is taken only by a nationally representative sample of children and has no ramifications for either the kids or their schools. And when it comes to civics and U.S. history, keep in mind that the latest scores are for 8^th graders, who might be too young to see a lot of relevance of the subjects to their lives. Most are four or five years from voting, and history can seem really, really distant and irrelevant when you are only 13 or 14 years old. And as Bryan Caplan has shown, even if test scores are high, we tend to retain little of what we’ve ever learned.

It is better if kids know our history and understand how our system of government works than if they don’t. But if higher test scores were largely a product of teaching to tests or, worse, testing strategies versus knowledge, then we weren’t really getting what we wanted. And if we retain little of what we learn, higher test scores might not ultimately translate into more knowledgeable or active citizens.

So while it’s reasonable to be concerned about dropping tests scores, it is also important to be calm, and not let panic drive policy, especially toward relatively quick, centralized “solutions” such as an expensive federal civics and history initiative, or something like that. If anything, research points to decentralization, repeatedly finding that private schools produce more knowledgeable and tolerant citizens than public, controlling for factors like family income. But we have that lesson regardless of the latest NAEP results, which, by the way, also do not include private school scores.

There is, indeed, a big limit to what NAEP scores tell us.

Last week, the Federal Reserve and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) both released reports on the large bank failures that occurred in March 2023. Both reports reveal serious shortcomings of the U.S. regulatory framework for banks.

The GAO report discusses the failures of both Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, institutions regulated at the federal level (primarily) by the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), respectively. The Fed’s report deals exclusively with SVB and its parent holding company, Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group (SVBFG). Both reports make it clear that regulators were aware, for many years prior, of the problems that caused these banks to fail in 2023.

The very first page of the GAO report, for example, states that “In the 5 years prior to 2023, regulators identified concerns with Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, but both banks were slow to mitigate the problems the regulators identified and regulators did not escalate supervisory actions in time to prevent the failures.” Regarding Signature, page 26 of the GAO report notes:

Although FDIC took some actions to escalate its supervisory actions in 2019 and 2020, its actions were inadequate given the bank’s longstanding liquidity and management deficiencies. Furthermore, FDIC lacked urgency despite Signature Bank’s repeated failures to remediate liquidity and management issues. [Emphasis added.]

The failure to act more forcefully with an individual bank that is a repeat offender is bad enough, but it’s even worse for the FDIC considering it too is a repeat offender when it comes to inaction. As page 27 of the GAO report explains, an earlier GAO report (from 2011) detailed shortcomings with the FDIC’s prompt corrective action framework, the regulatory regime Congress enacted in 1991 to “address deficiencies at depository institutions and minimize losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund.”

To be fair, in 2013, the FDIC did address some of the concerns raised in the 2011 GAO report. Still, as explained on page 17, a separate GAO report in 2015 demonstrates that this kind of slow-to-act pattern has been around for a while. Specifically, the 2015 report notes that “although regulators often identified risky practices early in previous banking crises, the regulatory process was not always effective or timely in correcting the underlying problems before the banks failed.”

To its credit, the Fed’s report acknowledges similar supervisory mistakes at the Fed – as well as SVB’s board and management’s mistakes – leading up to SVB’s failure.

As the report explains, the Fed supervised the parent holding company of SVB as a “regional banking organization” for more than twenty years, and there were several long-standing problems, including those with SVBFG’s governance and controls, liquidity, and capital. Regarding the commercial bank itself, the report notes that “SVB’s foundational problems were widespread and well-known, yet core issues were not resolved, and stronger oversight was not put in place.”

In case there’s any doubt, the second page of the executive summary states that “SVBFG was a highly vulnerable firm in ways that both SVBFG’s board of directors and senior management and Federal Reserve supervisors did not fully appreciate.” These statements are quite revealing.

At best, these statements are an acknowledgement that the U.S. bank regulatory framework provides a false sense of security, and even the people with the most knowledge in the financial industry cannot possibly guarantee that things won’t go wrong. At worst, they’re a major condemnation of the regulatory system, particularly the Basel regime and the so-called enhanced supervision courtesy of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

The Dodd-Frank regulations, of course, have been the source of a heated debate since SVB’s failure. That debate, as I wrote in March, hinges on whether Dodd-Frank provided sufficient protections against bank failures like the demise of SVB, and whether the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (the Economic Growth Act) rolled back those protections. While it’s true that SVBFG would have been subject to several different requirements had Congress not passed the Economic Growth Act, it is not at all clear that those requirements would have prevented SVB’s failure.

More importantly, absent the Dodd-Frank Act, regulators had enormous discretion to impose restrictions and requirements on SVB itself – the bank, not the holding company – if they decided the bank was acting in an unsafe or unsound manner. The Fed could have escalated its enforcement actions in any number of ways to reduce the riskiness of SVB, but it failed to do so for many years.

The Fed was the regulator for SVB for more than twenty years, and the Trump appointed Vice Chair of Supervision, Randy Quarles, left the Fed in October 2021 after a four-year term. If Quarles’ tenure at the Fed created such a seismic “shift in culture and expectations” at the Fed, then the Fed should provide hard evidence, not self-serving hearsay.

Regardless, these issues are a distraction from the Fed’s supervisory failures and the failure of the regulatory framework itself. (The report claims that the “root cause” of the Fed’s delays around supervisory actions is “difficult to ascertain,” so maybe the Fed’s inspector general will be able to figure it out.) The Fed’s evaluation of the enhanced supervision regime, as created by Dodd-Frank and amended by the Economic Growth Act, provides multiple examples of the broad problems with the U.S. regulatory framework.

For instance, U.S. banking laws are preoccupied with regulating the holding company that owns a bank rather than the bank itself. The rules and regulations are beyond complex, and multiple federal regulators – including those at the Board of Governors, the district Fed banks, and the FDIC – have enormous discretion to implement and enforce those regulations. The framework depends on arbitrary cutoffs and ill-defined concepts. For all the complexity of the capital and liquidity rules, they still depend on subjective assessments and projections.

This last problem is clearly demonstrated in the report’s discussion of SVB and the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR). It is true, for instance, that SVB would have been subject to a higher LCR requirement, with more frequent reporting, had Congress not passed the Economic Growth Act. It is difficult to argue, however, that this change would have saved SVB.

For starters, the Fed’s own estimates (Table 13, page 88) suggest that SVB would have been incredibly close to the higher metric at the beginning of 2022. Other estimates suggest that SVB would have met the LCR requirements by the end of 2022 as well, but the discrepancy only further demonstrates the problem. Once major component of the LCR is the expected net cash flow, and there is no dispute that SVB failed when it experienced unprecedented outflows.

The other major component of the LCR is known as high quality liquid assets (HQLAs), and the idea is that the bank has to have enough HQLA to cover its expected cash outflows. Several items qualify as HQLAs, with some being deemed higher quality than others. The highest quality (Level 1) includes Treasury securities, the second highest quality (Level 2A) includes securities issued by government-sponsored enterprises, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the lowest quality (Level 2B) includes high grade corporate bonds.

Setting aside the question of how accurately anyone could estimate the bank’s cash flows, SVB could have met a higher LCR by shifting out of Fannie/​Freddie securities and into Treasuries. However, SVB ran into trouble because it had to sell securities at a loss after interest rates rose, so having long-term Treasuries really wouldn’t have mattered. One could argue regulators would have forced the bank to operate differently, but we already know, for a fact, that regulators were slow to act on any of the concerns they flagged at SVB. Given how unusual SVB’s business model was relative to other banks and how fast it was growing, it’s even more difficult to make that case.

There is no doubt the United States could use a major overhaul of its banking laws and regulations, but it doesn’t need more complexity or even more regulation. The overhaul should be based on exactly what Michael Barr, the Fed’s current vice chair for supervision, has called for on multiple occasions: humility. In other words, the system should be retooled based on the fact that nobody is particularly good at assessing and identifying new and emerging risks. The current system provides a false sense of security, and it’s long past the time to move in a different direction.

This coming May 25 will mark three years since the murder of George Floyd by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. That event sparked some of the largest political street protests since the Vietnam War era. In both cases, the federal government’s reaction was to increase domestic surveillance targeting the protesters. This time, however, two federal entities that did not exist during the 1960s protests were key players in responding to the national outcry over Floyd’s murder: the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The public learned about the DEA’s role in the surveillance operation in June 2020 via the now-defunct Buzzfeed News:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to a two-page memorandum obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The authority in question, 21 U.S.C. § 878(a)(5), allows DEA agents to “perform such other law enforcement duties as the Attorney General may designate.” In this case “other law enforcement duties” clearly included surveillance and possibly other operations designed to monitor or even infiltrate groups protesting Floyd’s murder. That authority was supposed to have expired later in June 2020, but neither the AG’s office or the DEA have ever revealed whether the additional powers granted to DEA lapsed or were extended.

Almost a year after Buzzfeed News broke the DEA surveillance story, Gizmodo noted a DHS component, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had employed Predator drone surveillance against protesters:

The incident inspired a debate about federal policing tactics and spurred some lawmakers to send letters to agencies demanding additional information about their practices. Amazingly, the CBP director at the time claimed the drones were not being used for spying but were instead merely “providing assistance to state and local [officials] so they could make sure that their cities and their towns were protected.”

The work by Buzzfeed and Gizmodo helped to highlight the roles of DEA and CBP in protest-related surveillance, but many questions about the scope, duration, and effects of that surveillance (and possibly other counterprotest actions) remain unanswered. This week, Cato took a step towards getting those answers by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against DEA and CBP–both of which have stonewalled Cato’s FOIA requests for nearly three years. We expect a fight from both agencies to keep as many of those records as possible secret, and we’ll provide updates on these cases as they occur.