As millions of New Englanders brace for the coming winter chill and historically high energy prices, they might be interested to know that—per government emails obtained by the Cato Institute—at least one federal agency has been working with maritime industry lobbyists to deny them access to U.S. energy.

As Cato scholars have detailed, the Jones Act ensures that New England cannot access U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) and other energy products via tanker ships. For the same reason, hurricane-hit Puerto Rico was recently forced to seek an emergency waiver of the 1920 law to obtain a limited quantity of U.S. LNG being stored in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Due to a total lack of LNG tankers that comply with the Jones Act, U.S. LNG can be sent to foreign countries but not domestic markets.

The denial of U.S.-origin energy to Americans due to protectionist maritime laws during times of crisis is troubling and farcical on its face. But the situation becomes downright scandalous when it’s revealed that a major impediment to relief is the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), working hand in glove with (or for?) the domestic maritime industry.

For many months Cato Institute scholars have been sifting through thousands of pages of documents obtained from MARAD via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). As previously noted, one of these documents included a call for members of the Cato Institute to be charged with treason. But other things have been revealed as well.

Among these are efforts by MARAD to thwart proposed waivers of the Jones Act during the Trump administration for the transportation of LNG. While the agency’s opposition does not surprise, the level of misinformation—if not outright dishonesty—is deeply concerning. These documents suggest that, at least in matters concerning the Jones Act, MARAD is properly regarded as a taxpayer-funded lobbyist for the U.S. maritime industry.

Background: In early 2016 the United States began large-scale exports of LNG following the opening of an export facility in Sabine Pass, Louisiana. As export levels increased, observers began to point out the Jones Act’s role in preventing this LNG from reaching U.S. consumers. In March 2018, for example, the Texas Railroad Commissioner sent an open letter to Congress noting the Northeast’s importation of gas from Russia instead of Texas because of the Jones Act. In August of that year, a group of New England governors floated the possibility of Jones Act modifications to help meet regional energy needs while that December Massachusetts released a comprehensive energy plan that repeatedly cited the Jones Act as an obstacle to obtaining domestic LNG.

Later that same month, Puerto Rico kicked the Jones Act hornet’s nest in earnest by requesting a ten-year waiver of the law so that it could gain access to U.S. LNG.

With momentum for a Jones Act waiver building, MARAD swung into action. To wit:

Email #1: Senior MARAD Official Attempts to Dissuade the Energy Department from Supporting a Jones Act Waiver: On January 9, 2019, MARAD Deputy Administrator Richard Balzano sent an email to two of Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao’s top staffers, noting interest in a Jones Act waiver from Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. To head off this possible waiver, Balzano requested permission to reach out to Department of Energy officials to inform them of the alleged “devastating impact” it would have on the U.S. maritime industry. The claim is a curious one, particularly given that the entire rationale for such a waiver is that bulk transportation of LNG is not a service that the U.S. maritime industry provides.

Email #2: Senior MARAD Official Misleads State Officials in Attempt to Discourage Pursuit of a Jones Act Waiver: Nine days later, Balzano emailed Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s director of federal-state relations, the Massachusetts undersecretary of energy, and Exelon’s director of state government affairs in a clear attempt at discouraging them from pursuing a Jones Act waiver so that New England could obtain domestic LNG. Balzano stated that any such waiver would encounter “a very difficult path” with surefire opposition from the White House and Department of Defense among others, and the Department of Energy also likely to oppose. Balzano also claims that Puerto Rico’s waiver request made the previous month had already been widely rejected.

Statements about likely opposition from the Department of Energy conflict with Balzano’s email earlier that month noting Secretary Rick Perry’s interest in a Jones Act waiver. Talk of White House opposition, meanwhile, conflicts with the fact that senior White House staffers presented President Trump with a long-term Jones Act waiver for LNG in April of that same year—a proposal Trump was said to initially support. Furthermore, the notion that Puerto Rico’s requested Jones Act waiver had already been rejected at this early date does not comport with the fact that a rejection letter was not sent until seven months later.

In the same email, meanwhile, Balzano also attempts to downplay the need for a waiver to meet New England’s LNG needs. Balzano noted the existence of a Jones Act-compliant LNG barge whose owners “have agreed to divert and support New England in times of need” as well as some older LNG tankers that Balzano claims are Jones Act-compliant.

Such talk is risible. The only vessel in existence at the time of Balzano’s email that matches his description is the Clean Jacksonville, a 2,200 cubic meter capacity bunkering barge used to refuel LNG-powered ships. For perspective, a 2015 Government Accountability Office report notes that most modern tanker vessels used to transport LNG have a cargo volume of 160,000 to 170,000 cubic meters. In other words, the vessel offered by Balzano has a storage capacity less than 2 percent that of a typical LNG tanker and is thoroughly impractical as a solution to New England’s energy needs.

The three older LNG cargo ships cited by Balzano, meanwhile, appear to be a reference to the LNG Virgo, LNG Gemini, and LNG Leo. Built by a U.S. shipyard in the late 1970s, these ships became foreign-flagged in the late 1990s and thus lost their ability to transport LNG within the United States. Legislation passed in 2011 allowed these ships to become re-registered in the United States and gain Jones Act privileges provided their ownership did not change, but in 2017 exactly that happened when all three ships were sold to South Korean firm Sinokor. Thus, Balzano’s proposed use of ships exceeding 40 years of age as a stopgap solution wasn’t feasible even if there was interest in using the ancient vessels.

Eagle-eyed observers, meanwhile, will note that the three ships are also mentioned in the same document calling for Cato Institute staff to be tried for treason (a proposed reflagging of these ships is the very next bullet point).

Email #3: Coordinated Efforts to Head Off a Waiver: In addition to his own efforts to halt a waiver, Balzano was also coordinating with the President of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Admiral Francis McDonald, to discourage Jones Act waiver efforts by Massachusetts state officials. On Jan. 23, 2019, Balzano emailed McDonald informing him that he told Massachusetts state officials “we would not support a waiver to the Jones Act and nor would the White House and the DOD, or DHS” and that he provided the officials with McDonald’s contact information.

McDonald then responded that he had undertaken his own efforts to engage with state officials and noted that he had been provided with contact information for the undersecretary of energy by the K&L Gates lobbying firm (which represents the American Maritime Partnership, a Jones Act industry advocacy organization). Mark Ruge, a lobbyist for K&L Gates, was cc’d on the email from McDonald to Balzano.

These exchanges follow a January 18 email from McDonald to Balzano and Ruge highlighting his effort to steer Massachusetts state officials away from a Jones Act waiver.

Email #4: Top MARAD Official Contradicts Earlier Talk of Waivers Being Rejected: On January 31, 2019, MARAD’s top official Mark Buzby sent an email to the President and CEO of TOTE Maritime, a Jones Act shipping company, noting the need for “potential Jones Act solutions to domestic movement specifically to [New England] and [Puerto Rico] where there are waiver discussions happening.” That waiver discussions were happening appears to contradict emails from Balzano to Massachusetts state officials earlier that same month that a waiver for Puerto Rico had already been rejected and that there was widespread opposition in the executive branch to Jones Act waivers.

Notably, TOTE’s CEO also expresses appreciation to Buzby for “your support on the Jones Act as we work through issues from time to time, specifically the politics in Puerto Rico.”

Summing up: These are just a small number of emails from a single month. Even this, however, is sufficient to show an organization actively trying to stymie Jones Act waivers and peddling information that is either unknowingly inaccurate (disturbing given that MARAD should be the most knowledgeable U.S. government agency regarding maritime affairs) or meant to deceive. Such efforts appear indistinguishable from those of pro-Jones Act lobbyists. Indeed, here is an email from Deputy Administrator Balzano to lobbyist Mark Ruge requesting his input on an apparent document outlining the Jones Act’s alleged benefits and a set of LNG talking points seemingly meant for “S1”—an apparent reference to Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao:

MARAD’s efforts to deny Americans access to American energy—not the first time it has done so—were ultimately successful. President Trump, after initially indicating his support for a Jones Act waiver for LNG shipments, ultimately backed off (further details here). Shortly after the waiver’s failure, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao—whose department oversaw MARAD—was named an American Maritime Hero by the American Maritime Partnership, a pro-Jones Act advocacy group. Richard Balzano, meanwhile, left MARAD in December 2020 to become the CEO and Executive Director of the pro-Jones Act Dredging Contractors of America.

Whether MARAD is a textbook example of regulatory capture or simply believes that its mission is indistinguishable from advancing the wants and desires of the U.S. maritime industry, the end result is the same. New England will face its winter energy woes without access to American LNG due to the Jones Act while Puerto Rico’s own energy travails are exacerbated for the same reason.

The U.S. maritime industry is no doubt thankful it has a government agency dedicated to looking after its interests, but who is looking out for the American people?

In the interest of full transparency, the Cato Institute is happy to provide the complete set of emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. To request these emails please use the contact information provided here.

I used to say that Deng Xiaoping should receive the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty because he had freed more people than anyone in history. His latest successor as China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has just become China’s unchallenged dictator, seems bent on reversing that achievement.

(Of course, Deng couldn’t actually have received the prize because he had died before the prize was created, and also because his rough methods both before and after his ascension to supreme power would have disqualified him.)

The victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and the subsequent rule of Mao Zedong created a one-party tyranny and desperate poverty in China. The “Great Leap Forward” led to mass starvation. The Cultural Revolution unleashed “an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness” in which “tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed.” Estimates of the number of unnatural deaths during Mao’s tenure range from 15 million to 80 million.

Which was no surprise. The party was formed in 1921 with an official ideology of Marxism‐​Leninism. On July 1, 1949, as the Communist armies neared victory, party leader Mao Zedong made an important speech titled, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Mao spoke of “the extinction of classes, state power and parties,” of “a socialist and communist society,” of the nationalization of private enterprise and the socialization of agriculture, of a “great and splendid socialist state” in Russia, and especially of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” That was the CCP’s founding vision, which it carried out.

After Mao’s death Deng Xiaoping, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, came to power. He had learned something from the 30 years of calamity. He began to implement policies he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which looked a lot like freer markets: decollectivization and the “responsibility system” in agriculture, privatization of enterprises, international trade, liberalization of residency requirements. And China started emerging from poverty and tyranny.

The changes that Deng wrought are the greatest story in the world—more than a billion people brought from totalitarianism to a largely capitalist economic system. According to the Economic Freedom of the World report, China’s economy was significantly freed. China remains only 116^th in the world in economic freedom (out of 165 countries), but compared to communism that’s a big step up.

Thanks to the economy’s liberalization China’s GDP per capita (in constant dollars) has risen from $326 at the time of Mao’s death to more than $11,000. When the Cato Institute held conferences in Shanghai in 1988 and 1997, it seemed that China was becoming more prosperous and even somewhat more open to economic and political discussion. New York Times reporter Howard W. French wrote in 2008, “China’s example shows what kinds of remarkable results can follow when governments stop committing colossal blunders and grossly shackling or preying upon their own people.”

And then along came Xi, who became the leader of the Communist Party and the state in 2012. From that point on, Xi began to crack down on independent thought, independent businesses and businessmen, and state and party officials who demonstrated any independence. Xi has become more authoritarian, and has concentrated more power in his own person than any ruler since Mao. Some say China is becoming “the perfect dictatorship.” As Jude Blanchette and Evan S. Medeiros wrote, Xi Jinping moved not only to make himself and the party more powerful but also to make the party more ideological. New guidelines for party membership in 2014 “required all individuals entering the CCP to ‘possess a belief in Marxism and in socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as a basic criterion. So too must members ‘place political standards above all else,’ which entails priority to Party commands and ideology.”

The just-completed Communist Party Congress has confirmed Xi’s absolute rule. He has filled the upper ranks of party leadership with his own loyalists. China is richer and more powerful than ever, and Xi rules more absolutely than any Chinese leader since Mao. But he cannot be entirely happy with what he surveys. China’s reported GDP growth rate has fallen off dramatically, and a new study says that dictatorships including China have persistently reported higher rates than they actually achieved. Greg Ip writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Under the benign neglect of Mr. Jiang and Hu Jintao, leader from 2003 to 2013, entrepreneurialism and innovation flourished. China’s most impressive tech companies were founded in this period….

Mr. Xi has reined many of them in, singling out the most successful business leaders for harassment and prosecution, kneecapping their businesses and insisting all private companies adhere to the Communist Party’s priorities. Money still pours into Chinese startups, but the odds one will be the next Alibaba have diminished.

Tech leaders can’t leave China, but “they are telling their adult children to make their careers elsewhere,” said Sebastian Mallaby, who profiled China’s venture-capital industry in his book “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.”

Globally, more than a billion people have emerged from extreme poverty in the past 30 years, and the lion’s share of that number were in China. But with increased political control over the economy, that progress is not likely to continue. Xi’s lust for power is in direct conflict with continuing economic growth.

A scholar wrote in the Washington Post this week that the media should stop calling Xi the president of China. Yes, I thought when I saw the headline, he’s not an elected leader like most presidents; let’s call him something more accurate. But the scholar just wanted journalists to call him “general secretary,” the formal title that identifies his real power. Better, I’d say, to call him “dictator,” as journalists typically referred to Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet. “Chinese dictator Xi Jinping today ordered a crackdown on Hong Kong.” That would convey reality better than “president.”

Liberalism is the most revolutionary idea in world history. It has literally made the lives of billions of people not just freer and more comfortable but possible. Yet somehow dissatisfied people, and men (almost always men) bent on power, keep turning to alternative ideologies. Liberalism has faced challenges from monarchy, theocracy, fascism, communism, military dictatorship, “Asian values,” central planning, and more. Still countries find peace and prosperity in proportion to their embrace of liberal values and institutions.

China’s economic reforms—liberal reforms—since 1976 have dramatically reduced poverty, increased economic growth, and made Chinese companies some of the world’s largest. But if Xi moves the country further from liberalism, he will choke off its growth. And perhaps go down in Chinese history as the worst leader since Mao.

“Is race conscious affirmative action consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution?”

High school students around the country will be arguing both sides of this question when they participate in the Harlan Institute’s 11^th annual Virtual Supreme Court Competition, which is focused on Students for Fair Admission v. University of North Carolina. This unique event gives high schoolers the opportunity to form two-person teams to research constitutional law, write appellate briefs, argue against other students, and try to persuade a panel of attorneys and judges that their side is correct.

The Harlan Institute and the Virtual Supreme Court Competition were founded by Josh Blackman, professor at South Texas College of Law Houston and a Cato adjunct scholar. “After law school, I started a fantasy league for the U.S. Supreme Court,” he says. “When I learned that high school teachers were using it with their students, I decided to start a high school competition. It’s grown steadily each year.”

The competition is divided into five phases. The first phase involves researching and writing briefs. Teams that register by November 1^st are eligible for a virtual mentoring session with a lawyer in mid-November, which marks phase 2. The mentoring sessions help students finalize their briefs and prepare their preliminary round arguments.

Phase 3 is the preliminary round, during which participants prepare a YouTube video answering 10 questions about the case. The videos and briefs, which will be judged based on the competition’s scoring rubrics, must be uploaded by December 16^th. A select group of teams will advance to phase 4, the virtual competitions. In April 2023, the top two teams will travel to Washington, D.C. to argue before three federal judges in the championship round. The Harlan Institute covers travel costs for the teams that make it to the championship.

Each year, Josh chooses a case that is currently making its way through the federal courts. He develops a lesson plan with specific questions students must answer, but they can use any materials they want. The lesson plan includes links to actual court filings, relevant sections of law, and background information. Links to previous competitors’ briefs and videos are also available.

The Harlan Institute’s program is intended to be accessible to students regardless of their financial circumstances. There is no registration fee, the early rounds are completely virtual (and have been since the beginning), and the institute covers travel for the championship round. As such, it also gives students the opportunity to interact with students from a wide range of backgrounds and schooling models.

Josh is thrilled with the enthusiasm of teachers and students who have joined the program. “More than 400 students have participated in the competition, and many of our coaches come back each year,” he notes. “The goal of the Virtual Supreme Court is to deepen students’ understanding of the law as well as their ability to think critically, synthesize complex arguments, and advocate persuasively. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in our participants.”

For several years now Cato Institute scholars have been highlighting the costs and shortcomings of the Jones Act, an oft‐overlooked protectionist law that restricts waterborne transportation within the United States to vessels that are U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built and mostly U.S.-owned and crewed. As widely reported on Tuesday, our criticism has been regarded by some within the U.S. maritime industry—perhaps jokingly, perhaps not—as treasonous. Given this recent public attention, it’s worth quickly reviewing why we believe the Jones Act warrants intense criticism, regardless of what the law’s supporters might say or do in response:

• It has failed to produce a healthy U.S. maritime industry: Jones Act protectionism has presided over maritime stagnation and decay. Over the last four decades, the number of Jones Act-compliant oceangoing cargo ships has more than halved. That fact is in large part due to U.S. commercial shipbuilding’s staggering lack of competitiveness. A new U.S.-built tanker, for example, is estimated to cost approximately $130 million more ($175 million versus $45 million) than one built abroad. The last Jones Act-compliant containership built, meanwhile, cost over $225 million compared to $41 million for a similar-sized vessel built in South Korea—a greater than 5x price delta. Unsurprisingly, the astronomical cost of new ships has proven a poor means of encouraging maritime commerce. What it has effectively done, however, is deter the acquisition of new vessels and given Jones Act ships unnaturally long lifespans: the last 15 ships scrapped or removed from the Jones Act fleet had an average age of nearly 43 years, far beyond that commonly found in international commercial shipping.
• It has undermined shipbuilding competitiveness: The Jones Act bears considerable culpability for the shipbuilding industry’s poor state. Building for a relatively small captive domestic market has disincentivized the scale and specialization required for U.S. shipbuilders to compete internationally. As a result, they find themselves caught in a cost-quantity trap described by my colleague Scott Lincicome last year: “[H]igher prices for U.S. ships depress demand for shipping services, thereby leading U.S. companies to purchase fewer American‐​made vessels. Producers, in turn, build fewer ships, thus preventing economies of scale and specialization and thereby making U.S. shipyards even less competitive (and more expensive) going forward. Rinse and repeat until you have the zombie industry we see today.” The few cargo ships that are built (an average of just three per year since 2000), meanwhile, are highly reliant on foreign inputs, shattering any notions that the Jones Act has spared the country from dependence on foreigners for its shipbuilding needs.
• It has failed to meet U.S. national security needs: While national security is commonly cited as a reason to retain the law, when called upon in times of conflict the Jones Act has fallen well short. The United States was so bereft of U.S. commercial shipping for its sealift needs in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, for example, that it twice requested—unsuccessfully—the use of a Soviet ship to transport U.S. military equipment. The U.S. ships that were used suffered from mariner shortages, requiring the use of retirees to plug the gap. The law’s contributions to U.S. sealift needs remain sufficiently paltry that a 2020 government report failed to list Jones Act shipping as one of the “primary resources to serve as a naval and military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency.” Last year the head of the U.S. Transportation Command admitted that the Jones Act fleet would be unlikely to be counted upon to meet U.S. sealift needs.
• It impedes domestic commerce, especially for energy: While ocean shipping is typically considered an efficient means of moving goods across long distances, the Jones Act has made such transportation a last, high-cost resort in the United States, typically employed in only places like Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Alaska that have few (if any) alternatives. Even worse, sometimes the Jones Act makes domestic waterborne transportation flatly impossible. The United States is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), yet Puerto Rico and New England must import it because there are no Jones Act-compliant LNG tankers to transport it. (Building one here would be mind-bogglingly expensive.) Hawaii imports propane despite domestic plenty for the same reason.
• It impedes disaster response: When disaster strikes the Jones Act makes it more costly and difficult to effectively move aid to the U.S. places that need it. In the wake of Hurricane Fiona, for example, a ship transporting diesel fuel from Texas to Puerto Rico had to wait for days until a waiver of the law was issued allowing its cargo to be unloaded. Following last year’s Colonial Pipeline shutdown, meanwhile, the law prevented foreign ships from helping to speed fuel from Gulf Coast refineries to East Coast consumers. The Jones Act means fewer options at precisely those times when maximum flexibility is required.
• It harms the environment: A dearth of competitive shipping options means increased demand for less environmentally friendly means of moving goods, such as trucking. The sky-high cost of new ships, meanwhile, deters fleet modernization and the adoption of more efficient and less polluting technologies. According to a Cato Institute paper published by economist Timothy Fitzgerald the total environmental benefits of the Jones Act’s repeal could exceed $8 billion.
• It funds lobbyists, not innovation: The U.S. maritime industry may be woefully uncompetitive in the actual business of shipping but has mastered the art of lobbying, spending almost $10 million on campaign contributions in 2021 alone. Indeed, the Jones Act itself—Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920—was the result of Seattle‐​based shipping companies urging Sen. Wesley Jones of Washington state to prevent the shipment of goods to and from Alaska via foreign ships operating out of Canada. A world without the Jones Act would mean less money for K Street lobbyists and increased investment in more productive areas.
• It’s archaic: While the Jones Act was passed in 1920, it is only the latest iteration of restrictions on foreign shipping that date back to the country’s founding. This was a time when, thanks to vast forests useful for constructing the wooden ships of the day, U.S. shipbuilders were some of the world’s best and merchant ships could be repurposed to hunt enemy shipping with the addition of cannons. The country and the maritime world have changed tremendously since then, but U.S. cabotage laws have not.
• It’s unfair: To the marginal extent the Jones Act provides ships, mariners, and shipbuilding to meet national security needs, the burden of doing so is borne in vastly disproportionate fashion by the residents of Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico that are highly reliant on ocean shipping. The country’s defense is a classic public good that should be paid for in a transparent and direct fashion, not through protectionism with opaque costs that fall most heavily on the small percentage of Americans who reside in the non-contiguous states and territories.

Cato Institute scholars who critique the Jones Act have no objection to ensuring that the country’s national security needs—the ultimate public good—are effectively met. But the Jones Act fails to do so, all while undermining the country’s prosperity. The law is an act of self-sabotage that is unfair, outdated, and ineffective in meeting its stated goals. By any reasonable standard, it should have been done away with long ago.

If saying that risks “treason” allegations, then so be it.

When members of Congress are done with this November’s election, they’ll return to Washington for a lame duck session during which lawmakers will consider a long list of issues that threaten to drive up spending by trillions of dollars. From additional aid to Ukraine, to emergency spending for hurricane damage, and increasing welfare and entitlement spending, members of Congress have set themselves up with a “must-pass” bill in mid-December.

Lawmakers must not use the threat of a government shutdown during an unaccountable lame duck Congress to push through controversial legislation that will drive up federal deficits and debt—especially now, as the Federal Reserve is taking aggressive steps to control inflation.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has produced a detailed accounting of the myriad issues up for consideration before the end of this year. They estimate that this lame duck Congress is looking at driving up deficits by $555 billion in year one and by a total of $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years. That amounts to $4,500 for every American household next year. And even these shocking figures do not account for the corresponding increase in the cost of interest from higher deficits.

Many of these issues will likely come to a head with the December 16^th expiration of discretionary appropriations—the spending bills governing about one-third of the federal budget, including defense, government agency and department operations, and more than a thousand social and economic programs. If Congress doesn’t extend appropriations, federal government operations would partially shut down.

Though if past Congresses are any indication, lawmakers may decide to up the pressure yet more by extending the continuing resolution currently in place by an extra week to run up against Christmas. Nothing quite incentivizes members of Congress to finish dirty legislative business than a desire to go home for the holidays.

Lame duck sessions of Congress present a further moral hazard because they reduce lawmaker’s accountability to voters. And passing controversial legislation during lame ducks is becoming more prevalent. As James Wallner and Paul Winfree wrote:

[Lame duck legislating] allows Members to deliberately postpone unpopular decisions until after their constituents cast their votes. […] A review of the lame-duck sessions held since ratification of the 20th Amendment [intended to eliminate the use of lame-duck sessions] illustrates that outgoing majorities in the House and Senate now openly work to pass as much of their agenda as they can before the new year.

Lawmakers should refrain from abusing this upcoming lame duck session to pursue any legislative items that are not absolutely necessary. Since lawmakers have punted on their responsibility to enact fiscal year 2023 spending bills when those bills were due on September 30^th, enacting a massive omnibus package during a lame duck Congress will lead to far worse outcomes than punting on those bills once more.

“Biden wants to let gig workers be employees,” reads the headline on a Washington Post story. The lead paragraph says the Biden Department of Labor intends to “make it easier” for independent contractors to be considered employees, “granting them access to benefits and federal labor protections.”

“Let” is truly a bizarre wording here, reinforced by words like “easier” and “granting.” The proposed Labor Department regulation doesn’t grant permission, it imposes a requirement. It would force employee status on many workers who actively wish to remain independent contractors. Unless you grasp that, you’re not going to grasp the mounting anger among many freelancers, independent truckers, and others whose livelihood is threatened by DOL’s proposal to sharply restrict independent contracting in the workplace.

We’ve seen this before with California’s disastrous AB 5, which was repeatedly revised to exclude lines of business in which it was causing havoc. While media coverage of the issue tends to focus on platform-based gig-workers, workers hurt by AB 5 included many tutors, performers in music and theater, plumbers, nurse practitioners, writers, photographers, contract software developers, and many others, notably owner-operators and other independent truckers.

And we’ve also seen this at the federal level in its previous go-round as the Obama administration’s 2015 initiative along the same lines (although this version would go even further). As we noted then, the intended restrictions on franchising and subcontracting would endanger the thriving white‐​van culture of small skilled contractors by which so many tradespeople now find upward mobility, trading it instead for clock-punching at some company division. And it would force tech, creative, and startup firms that currently outsource functions like cafeteria, janitorial, and landscape maintenance to take on much wider direct employment responsibilities they may not be particularly well equipped to handle.

Most of the jobs the new regulation would endanger aren’t “gig economy” jobs at all and have nothing to do with platform apps. Nonetheless, it’s worth emphasizing that, as Ike Brannon and others have shown, the platform/“gig” sector of the economy makes possible flexibility on time and hours that is highly valued by many current workers and would be threatened under an arrangement in which employers would have strong reason to terminate contractors who put in time sporadically or for only a few hours a week.

The public can file comments here through November 28.

New data show that growth in federal worker pay lagged growth in private-sector pay in recent years. The average federal worker still makes far more than the average private-sector worker in total compensation, but the advantage has narrowed. From the taxpayer perspective, the moderation in federal worker costs is good news.

Figure 1 shows average wages for the U.S. private sector and for the federal government’s 2.2 million civilian workers. Federal pay growth outpaced private pay growth for the decade up until 2011 when a three-year soft wage freeze kicked in. After that, federal wages resumed strong growth until 2018. The data is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis national income accounts, Table 6.6D.

Then in 2020 and 2021, federal pay growth slowed and private pay soared, as shown in the figure. Average federal wages rose 1.8 percent in 2020 and 2.3 percent in 2021, while average private-sector wages increased 7.7 percent in 2020 and 5.9 percent in 2021.

The consumer price index increased 1.2 percent in 2020 and 4.7 percent in 2021. Thus, real federal wages rose in 2020 and fell in 2021, while real private wages soared in 2020 and rose slightly in 2021. Now in 2022, inflation is soaring and pushing down real wages for most workers across the economy.

Here are some observations on the pay data:

• Private pay is set in markets, and high worker demand in recent years has pushed pay upwards. By contrast, federal pay is set by politics and is less responsive to changing economic conditions.
• Some reporters worry about a worker exodus from the public sector, but I don’t think that will be a major problem in the federal government. The voluntary quit rate in the federal government is still only one-quarter as high as in the private sector, which suggests that federal workers are satisfied with their compensation packages.
• One reason workers favor federal employment is that the benefits are more lucrative than in the private sector. The BEA data show that the average value of benefits in the federal workforce was $44,021 in 2021, far higher than the $13,486 of average benefits in the private workforce. Figure 2 below shows the BEA data (from Table 6.2D) for total compensation (wages plus benefits).
• Another advantage of federal employment is the high job security. Federal workers are laid off at just one-quarter the rate of private-sector workers. Job security could be a valuable benefit in coming months if the economy enters a major recession.