Interest in ranked choice voting has been spreading fast in communities across the country, with Seattle, Evanston, Ill., and Fort Collins, Colo. due to vote in November on whether to join New York City, Minneapolis, Portland, Me., and the 20 or so other localities that already use it. A key legal obstacle for communities that want to try out the method, however, can be in obtaining the needed go-ahead from their state governments. So it’s relevant to point out that from a small-government, individual-liberty perspective, the discretion to employ RCV if voters want it looks to be one of the most innocuous home-rule powers a municipality can request.

As I wrote five years ago in a different context, there isn’t really a strong reason for libertarians (or for that matter progressives or conservatives) to take an always-or-never view of municipal home rule powers. Should towns be free to set different street parking rules than the next town over? Probably yes. But what if a town wants to enact rent control? Ban the construction of any house worth less (or more) than $10 million? Make it illegal to serve alcohol to guests at home? How you feel about each of these probably has a lot to do with how you feel about the substantive laws involved. In other words, over a wide range, it’s okay to treat different home rule requests differently, based on both principled and prudential considerations about each proposed power.

For advocates of limited government and individual rights, a couple of categories of home rule law deserve at least especially intense scrutiny, if not automatic rejection:

• Laws that threaten to impair basic rights, such as the rights of property ownership or the right to keep and bear arms.
• Laws that dump costs on out-of-towners. Zoning rules, for example, often exclude land uses that as a result get foisted onto other communities. Restrictions on ride-share services may inflict costs both on tourists and on drivers who live in other towns. There’s a real public choice problem here, since so many of those who lose out don’t get a vote.
• Finally, some local laws, it should be conceded, do come at an unacceptable cost in statewide uniformity – which is one reason states mostly don’t let municipalities issue their own drivers’ licenses with added local requirements.

All that said, home rule principles do advance genuine values of decentralization in many situations. They may allow law to be tailored to genuine differences in local preference and – like federalism generally – make room for useful experimentation. They may enable higher levels of government to stay out of a given program area or avoid entering some divisive conflict.

On this checklist, local power to adopt ranked-choice voting scores extremely well. It doesn’t violate the rights or impair the legitimate interests of the town’s own citizens, much less of outsiders, on whom it has no direct effect at all. It allows procedure to be tailored to real difference in local preference, and allows experimental innovation at relatively low stakes. Finally, when adopted in local elections, it is typically consistent with important uniformity interests; for example, if a town acquires tabulation equipment geared to local RCV, that equipment still works for the methods used in races for governor and president. (Admittedly, things can get slightly more complicated if, for example, the law provides that a state agency needs to pre-clear all use of election equipment.)

It’s unfortunate that legislatures in Tennessee and Florida this spring enacted, and governors signed, measures banning local use of RCV, which had previously been approved by voters in Memphis, Tenn., and Sarasota, Fla. Both bans passed mostly or entirely on party lines, with Republicans in favor. Many on the right seem to think that because localities like Cambridge, Mass., and San Francisco have helped popularize the method, it must somehow favor progressive or left candidates in its workings.

That’s a baseless fear, I argue in a new syndicated opinion piece:

right‐​leaning parties have done quite well in Australia and Ireland, both of which have used ranked choice voting for a century (and are among the world’s most stable democracies). In August, Canada’s Conservatives used ranked‐​choice to pick Pierre Poilievre to fight the next election against Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

In Virginia, the GOP scored a standout win after using ranked choice voting to pick Glenn Youngkin as its candidate for governor in 2021.

It’s encouraging, therefore, that some other states have moved toward resolving the home rule issue the right way. In Virginia itself, where home rule powers are sharply limited under what’s known as the Dillon Rule, a new law passed last year opened the door for municipalities to give RCV a try. In Maryland, where both Montgomery County and Baltimore City have requested enabling legislation, next year may be the session in which the General Assembly grants the request. That’s the best way to go.

In September 2021, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had trapped thousands of Haitian immigrants under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas in inhumane conditions that violated U.S. legal requirements for detention. Haitians were forced to return to Mexico to get food to feed their families in the camp, and when they returned, agents on horseback tried to stop them.

The Del Rio disaster produced the most enduring images of border chaos under the Biden administration, and we now have the clearest proof yet that it was entirely unnecessary. CBP had the legal authority to let Haitians in legally and avoid the entire situation—a process that it finally created this summer, nearly ending illegal immigration from Haiti.

Leading up to the Del Rio detention camp, CBP had refused to admit the Haitians legally at ports of entry. When Haitians responded by crossing illegally to request asylum, CBP even closed the closest legal crossing point—yards from the detention camp—for everyone. In a lengthy February 2022 analysis of Haitian and Cuban migration, I described how CBP created this situation by denying Haitians the right to apply for asylum at ports of entry where—until 2019—almost all Haitians had entered the country legally.

In 2019, the Trump administration capped the number of admissions at ports of entry, deprioritized Haitians, and then started to return asylum seekers to Mexico even if they applied at ports of entry. Seeing the direction of policy, most Haitians gave up waiting to cross legally. Virtually all gave up waiting in 2020 when CBP completely shut down asylum processing at ports of entry, closing off all “non-essential” travel.

Figure 1 shows the percentage of Haitians entering the United States by legality. The implementation of the Remain in Mexico program turned a 99.5 percent legal flow to a 90+ percent illegal flow. Closing ports during the pandemic pushed the illegal flow to almost 100 percent of crossings. The reopening of ports for Haitians this summer flipped the processing back to 97 percent legal. CBP created a massive illegal immigration problem and then solved it.

Once they are allowed to appear at a port of entry, Haitians are given a notice to appear in immigration court and released. Nonprofit organizations in the United States help them reach their final destinations. Despite the fact that the administration has done virtually nothing to publicize this process, Haitians are learning via word of mouth about the possibility of crossing legally. Once Haitians began to be admitted in larger numbers, the word passed down to others. CNN’s Rosa Flores and Julia Jones reported last month about how this has happened:

About a dozen other migrants at the shelter [in Reynosa, Mexico] told CNN that they also learned from social media platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, that an organization in Reynosa was helping migrants cross into the United States legally.

The actual process for gaining admission is opaque. CBP is accepting referrals of asylum seekers from select non-profit organizations working along the border. In June of 2021, the administration selected six groups to refer asylum seekers to ports of entry. Following that, CBP started to accept some referrals including a few Haitians, but then shut down the small-scale processing at the end of August 2021. In April 2022, the administration said it was trying to rebuild this process, and in September, it said, “DHS has, beginning July 13, 2022, begun to gradually increase the number of humanitarian exceptions it applies, subject to operational constraints.”

In theory, this asylum referral process is open to any asylum seeker from any country, and some non-Haitians are being processed on a case-by-case basis as well. However, it is clear that Haitians are now a priority. During the small-scale processing from June to August 2021, Haitians were just 9 percent of all non-Mexicans encountered at ports of entry. During June to August 2022, Haitians were 45 percent. The total flow of Haitians—legal and illegal—was larger last year—19,000 versus 16,000 this year, so the higher share of Haitians being processed is not because of increased demand.

Unfortunately, CBP still feels the need to limit this process for other groups. It processed over 20,000 Ukrainian asylum seekers at ports of entry in the spring, but after it created a process where Ukrainians can fly directly to the United States, it has still not reached that rate of admissions since then. CBP has proven that permitting legal entry can end the border crisis. It just needs to apply what it has learned to other nationalities seeking to enter the country. Figure 2 compares the percentage of legal crossings for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and immigrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle.

Most strange is the fact that CBP has not applied this process to Cubans because Cubans had historically always entered legally at ports of entry alongside Haitians until 2019. Moreover, Cuba will not accept more than a very small number of deportations every year, so Border Patrol has to release them, meaning that there is no reason not to just process and release them at ports of entry. The same point is true for Venezuelans who the Maduro regime will not accept back.

While the process has worked for Haitians, CBP should stop relying on border nonprofits as the gatekeepers for asylum. The shelter in Reynosa described by CNN above was completely full, so anyone who cannot find a place to live while they try to get referred has no choice but to cross illegally. CBP needs to allow people to register for admission online before they reach the border and then quickly process them. This would end the border chaos.

Following a decade long earmark ban, members of Congress went all out on requesting earmarks in the most recent omnibus spending bill. According to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 included 4,963 earmarks that spend a cumulative total of $9.1 billion.

Lawmakers recently delayed fiscal year 2023 (FY2023) appropriations by extending 2022 spending programs via a continuing resolution (CR) through December 16^th. Congress is now preparing an omnibus spending package, comprising all 12 appropriations bills, that will likely span more than 2,500 pages of text. They should steer clear of earmarks and focus on spending reduction instead.

Congressional earmarks, which are more commonly known as “pork-barrel spending,” were rebranded as “congressionally directed spending” in the U.S. Senate and as “community project funding” in the House of Representatives. Earmarks are specific spending requested by a Member of Congress or a Senator on behalf of an entity, state, locality, or congressional district, that bypasses statutory or administrative formulae or competitive award processes.

Earmarks bypass competitive and other merit-based funding processes. This can mean a greater misallocation of resources and/​or government waste. They encourage lobbying or rent-seeking, which in itself is an economic cost. Earmarking also costs much of congressional staffs’ and legislators’ time, assuming they do their due diligence. If every member of Congress took full advantage of their 10 earmarks per fiscal year allowance, legislative staff would need to review more than 5,300 earmark requests per year. And earmark requests are unlikely to be spread out evenly on the calendar, likely clustering around fiscal deadlines—like the end of the fiscal year or as CR expiration dates approach.

Instead of spending valuable legislative time lobbying for specific constituents’ pet projects, lawmakers and their staff should focus on reviewing the merits of various federal spending programs and identifying areas where spending can be cut—especially over the next few weeks. They won’t need to look very far to find ample targets:

• The $461 billion that Congress allocated for unauthorized appropriations in 2022 would be a great place to start. Especially, since more than half of this spending went to programs that were set to expire more than 10 years ago. A more thorough review is long overdue.
• Congress should also spotlight programs that received massive cash injections from the COVID stimulus bills, including various loans and grants, income support programs, and state and local aid allocations.
• GAO’s list of high risk programs point to yet more areas where additional oversight is needed.
• CBO’s options to reduce the federal deficit offer an entire chapter focused on discretionary savings.
• The Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and Citizens Against Government Waste, among others, also stand at the ready with spending reduction proposals across departments and agencies, for any lawmaker willing to engage in fiscal restraint.

Congress has yet again skirted its responsibility to follow so-called regular order this September. Instead, lawmakers passed a CR, which is a stop-gap measure to provide funding for federal government agencies and programs that are subject to annual appropriations. It’s not too late to take a closer look at current spending allocations, before blindly agreeing to continue spending on the same programs through the remainder of FY2023.

If Congress extended all spending in the current CR for the remainder of FY2023, the U.S. would spend $1.707 trillion in discretionary spending. Add to that the $4.2 trillion (without subtracting off-setting receipts) in mandatory spending the Congressional Budget Office projects for FY2023, and the federal government is projected to spend nearly $6 trillion this year. And even these staggering figures likely understate next year’s federal spending footprint since they do not account for spending by the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, nor the most recent student loan forgiveness by executive order.

Earmarking is a distraction from more fundamental governing responsibilities such as reining in deficit-inflating spending.

What about the claim that earmarks make it easier to pass legislation? Kevin Kosar and Zachary Courser at the American Enterprise Institute make the case that “the earmark moratorium weakened the House of Representatives’ capacity to coalesce majorities to enact legislation.” That may very well be the case, but what are lawmakers using that capacity for? Lawmakers haven’t used earmarks to coalesce majorities for critical fiscal reforms — just the opposite. Earmarks seem to facilitate more spending, not less.

As the late Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) described during his days in Congress: “I have witnessed earmarking up close and know it is inherently corrupt. Earmarks were abused as a form of currency to buy and sell the votes of politicians and to reward political supporters.” We shouldn’t be overtly encouraging that kind of behavior among our elected representatives.

What about the claim that banning earmarks merely moves the practice behind closed doors? John Hudak at Brookings writes that “earmarks did not disappear with the so-called ‘earmarks ban’ in 2011; it simply transferred the behavior to the executive branch or made them more secretive within the legislative branch.”

Hudak is referring to so-called lettermarking or phonemarking, whereby legislators submit specific funding requests directly to agency personnel – who are often eager to comply, especially when receiving such requests from members of appropriations committees who determine their agency’s funding levels. Whether earmarks are allowed in congressional spending bills does not impede lawmakers’ ability to submit spending requests over the phone or in emails. Though, I agree with Hudak that banning earmarks makes letter- and phonemarking more likely.

James Dawson and Sam Kleiner argue in the Yale Journal of Regulation that letter- and phonemarking violates several legal rules – in addition to being in direct contradiction of executive guidance, such as executive order 13457. Rather than allowing for more loopholes through which Congress may move parochial concerns, we should find better ways of closing such loopholes and enforcing current legal spending guidelines.

I agree with earmark proponents on this point: state and local constituents have a better understanding than Washington bureaucrats of where project funding will do the most good. Which is why we should devolve more responsibilities back to states and localities to address their own needs and priorities without Washington as their middleman. Earmarking is the wrong way to ensure government spending reflects local priorities.

Over the last decade and a half, fertility rates in the U.S. have declined from above-replacement at the top of the Great Recession, to below replacement rate a few years later. Since then, fertility rates have continued along a downward trajectory.

More recently, the total fertility rate—a measure of the expected number of children a woman will have if she survives her reproductive years, and a sum of age-specific fertility rates—declined to record lows (1.64) during the pandemic. In 2021, U.S. births ticked up enough to put birth rates inline with their pre-pandemic, downward trend and remain at sub-replacement levels.

For a variety of reasons, sub-replacement level fertility and continued fertility decline have caused concern among researchers and commentators alike. For one thing, assuming that sub-replacement level fertility is sustained, and that it is not mitigated or offset by population momentum, increasing life expectancy, or immigration, population size will decline over time.^[1] This could have economic and fiscal implications, including declining overall GDP or widening solvency issues for major federal programs and public pensions.

Although most commentators focus on recent fertility decline, the history of declining fertility begins much earlier. During the hundred year period from 1800 to 1900, total fertility rates fell from seven children per woman to less than four (Figure 1) and continued to fall. This occurred during a period of rapid economic and social change that included industrialization, urbanization, changes in medicine and mortality, and implementation of compulsory childhood education in most states.

Then, in the first third of the twentieth century, fertility continued to decline, until the total fertility rate fell below the replacement rate prior to the second World War. Americans worried about low fertility in the pre-war years, during the war, and afterwards, though by the end of World War II fertility had begun to rebound. This “baby boom” shocked demographers of the day, who did not forecast it (in fact, quite the opposite, demographers projected a continued downward trend for fertility).

Later, demographers were unable to predict the end of the baby boom. Today, the cause of the baby boom is still debated, with various researchers arguing that factors including technological improvements, women’s labor market opportunities, and wartime mobilization motivated it. Adding to the mystery, the baby boom occurred both in countries that were involved in the war and countries that weren’t.

In addition to experiencing sub-replacement fertility briefly in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, the U.S. also experienced sub-replacement fertility during the three-decade-plus period from 1972 through 2005 (admittedly, during the latter half of this period, the fertility rate was relatively stable and remained close to replacement level).

Although many seem to think of falling fertility as self-evidently negative, some historical context helps to temper this impulse. For instance, during the longest sustained decline in fertility (1800–1940), child mortality dropped by around 86 percent. This arguably motivated at least a portion of the decline in fertility, since under diminishing child mortality, couples did not need to have as many births in order to achieve the same family size.

Similarly, during certain periods of (post-1930s) fertility decline, female labor force participation increased inversely with fertility.^[2] So, as women gained economic and social freedoms and joined the workforce, they also had fewer children. Though there is some debate whether increased labor force participation was a cause or a consequence of fertility decline during this period, women obtaining economic and social freedoms should be celebrated.

Likewise, certain causes of the most recent (2007–2022) fertility decline are not self-evidently negative: a significant portion of the recent decline in fertility is a result of a decline in teen births, which peaked in the ‘90s and fell 75 percent from 1991 until 2020. Teen fertility decline accelerated since 2007, just as U.S. fertility began its most recent decline.

Most people would consider the decline in teen births a positive development, as teenagers do not typically have the financial independence, academic or professional training, emotional development, and/​or a supportive and committed partner that makes caring for an infant easier or even possible. Indeed, in the 90s, the high rate of teen births was a major focus of policy scholarship.

In line with the idea that a significant piece of the recent decline in fertility is due to a decline in teenage births, another paper finds that 35 percent of the decline in fertility in the years between 2007 and 2016 is due to a reduction in unintended births, or births that were either undesired or occurred earlier than the mother would like. If true, a substantial portion of the decline in fertility is a function of women meeting their fertility preferences, not missing them.

Although fertility decline may have economic, fiscal, or social consequences, it is critical that information consumers and policymakers understand that fertility does not always decline for nefarious reasons. The history of U.S. fertility helps to provide some clarity on this account.

On Sunday, Brazilians will head to the polls for the first round of voting in their presidential election, with a runoff between the first two candidates scheduled for October 30^th. According to a recent poll, however, there might not be a runoff at all since former left-wing president Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva, who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010, might obtain over 50 percent of the vote in the first round and win outright. According to Gallup, only 38 percent of voters approve of the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, Da Silva’s main opponent. Bolsonaro trails Da Silva by well over 10 points in most polls, which project the incumbent’s defeat in a landslide if he does qualify for a runoff.

Since Bolsonaro first ran for president in 2018, the Associated Press and other outlets have labelled him the “Trump of the Tropics.” While comparisons between Donald Trump and other foreign leaders are often far-fetched, Bolsonaro has lent credence to the theory with his recent threats to not recognize the election’s results. As voters prepare to head to the polls, much of the global media has relished the prospect of Da Silva’s return to power at Bolsonaro’s expense.

“‘Olê, olá, Lula!’ Brazil’s voters sing for a heroic comeback to banish Bolsonaro,” reads a headline in The Guardian. “Lula Da Silva could back historic comeback in Brazil,” says Deutsche Welle.

The comeback — more histrionic than historic — refers to the way in which Da Silva slipped through the cracks of Brazil’s criminal justice system after receiving a 12-year jail sentence for corruption in 2017. His conviction arose from the Lava Jato (or Car Wash) investigation, which exposed a bribes-for-political-access scheme that shook politics in Brazil and throughout Latin America. As recently as November 2019, the current presidential frontrunner was behind bars.

Odebrecht, the Brazilian infrastructure conglomerate that bribed officials in 12 countries according to the U.S. Department of Justice, spent hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in kickbacks in Brazil during Da Silva’s time in office and that of Dilma Rousseff, his Chief of Staff and successor as president. Brazil’s Workers’ Party, to which both Da Silva and Rousseff belong, was at the scandal’s epicenter. In 2016, Rousseff was impeached, albeit over illegal measures to conceal a budget deficit.

In 2019, Brazil’s Supreme Court annulled Da Silva’s conviction when it ruled that former judge Sergio Moro, who led the Lava Jato proceedings, had no jurisdiction over the former president’s case as a federal judge from Curitiba, a city in the state of Paraná. As the BBC reported at the time, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin “agreed with Lula’s lawyers” that a Paraná court “should not have tried Lula because the crimes he was accused of did not take place in that state.” Fachin argued that, instead, Da Silva should be tried in Brasilia, the country’s capital, where the former president used to reside. He also considered that Moro was biased against Da Silva. Seven of eleven justices agreed, thus allowing the former president to leave prison and run for office once again.

Moro did reveal his political leanings when he became Bolsonaro’s justice minister. After his resignation, he ran for president himself (against both Bolsonaro and Da Silva), but ended his campaign due to a lack of voter support. Nevertheless, Moro is not the only judge to have ruled against Da Silva. In January of 2018, a Brazilian appeals court in the city of Portoalegre not only upheld Da Silva’s conviction unanimously, but also increased his sentence from nine years to twelve.

Since the Supreme Court’s subsequent annulment hinged on matters of jurisdiction, Da Silva’s alleged links with Odebrecht’s multitentacled and institutionalized disbursement of graft are yet to be fully clarified. This remains the case even though the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) determined last April that Da Silva’s trial had “violated his right to be tried by an impartial tribunal, his right to privacy and his political rights.”

As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes, Da Silva “was freed and maintains his innocence, though he was never cleared in court because he was never retried,” among other things due the expiration of the statute of limitations. There is also the matter that, as a Prosecutor General argued when Rousseff faced Odebrecht-related corruption accusations from her time as energy minister, “the president cannot be investigated during her term of office for facts not relevant to her actions as president.” When legal immunity is the prize of victory, a certain type of candidate can become extraordinarily keen to win the presidency.

There is also the matter of Justice Fachin, who hardly can claim political impartiality himself. When Rousseff appointed him to the Supreme Court in 2015, O Globo, a Brazilian daily, reported that, in 2010, Fachin, then a law school professor at the Federal University of Paraná, had signed and openly supported a lawyers’ manifesto urging voters to back Rousseff. It was necessary, the manifesto claimed, to guarantee the continuity of Da Silva’s political program.

Highly politicized courts have long been a staple of Latin American legal systems, which begs the question of why so many foreign journalists—after years of hammering the region’s “pervasive corruption” — have made light of Da Silva’s role in the Odebrecht scandal during the current campaign. Writing in The Spectator, for instance, one commentator assures that Da Silva’s corruption charges were “squashed,” which is hardly accurate. The concern for Bolsonaro’s more authoritarian instincts and his recent questioning of the country’s electoral system is justified. Giving Da Silva and the Workers’ Party a free pass for monumental levels of corruption, not so much.

It’s hard to believe it’s already the one-year anniversary of the Friday Feature. It’s been a great opportunity to talk to parents and teachers around the country who have stepped up to provide new learning environments for kids. It’s also enabled me to connect with policymakers and researchers while examining ways to encourage more education entrepreneurship.

Most Friday Feature pieces have highlighted educational options like microschools, hybrid schools, co-ops, learning pods, and homeschool programs. The diversity of options illustrates that education is not one size fits all. Classical education models, like Classical Conversations and Merit Academy, appeal to some families. Others prefer a less formal approach, such as unschooling. Some take education outside with a forest school like the Garden School or Barefoot University.

But there’s more to life than “school,” whatever form it takes. The Acton Children’s Business Fair, competitive speech and debate, sports, music, and cybersecurity competitions are examples of learning opportunities that can engage kids in a wide variety of ways.

Sometimes the Friday Feature focuses on policies that support innovation in education. The series started with a look at New Hampshire’s Learn Everywhere program, which allows public school students to earn graduation credits for certain outside educational opportunities. Tax credit scholarships and education savings accounts, which help parents choose an education beyond their assigned district schools, have been covered as general ideas and as specific programs in Tennessee and West Virginia.

In the past few years, private donors have become more involved in providing funding opportunities for educational entrepreneurs. The VELA Education Fund and the STOP Awards are grant programs that can help innovative educational models grow and expand. The combination of expanding school choice and new grant opportunities has also helped give rise to increasing numbers of teacher entrepreneurs.

The Friday Feature gives a glimpse of what is possible in education today. There’s no reason to limit kids to the district school they happen to live near—that’s a relic from a time gone by, when people traveled on foot or horse and buggy. With modern transportation and technology, the possibilities for individualized education are nearly limitless.

I’m looking forward to another year of connecting with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders and sharing their stories through the Friday Feature. And if you see something that would be a good fit, please send it my way.

Today the U.S. Senate passed, by unanimous consent, the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, co-sponsored by Senators Rand Paul (R‑KY) and Cory Booker (D‑NJ). The bill removes the mandate, included in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), that requires all drugs to be tested on animals to exclude toxicity. The bill does not end animal testing, but it now permits drug developers to use alternative methods to test for toxicity when feasible. Similar provisions are in a bill passed earlier in the U.S. House of Representatives, making this reform likely to become law.

Since the FDCA was passed 83 years ago, research has shown animal testing to be an inconsistent indicator of drug toxicity and, in many cases, alternative methods are equally or more reliable. Yet, because of the 1938 mandate, hundreds of animals must be killed for a pharmaceutical company to bring a single drug to market. Last year, Senator Paul held a “Puppy Press Conference,” making the case for the reform.

This bipartisan legislation is certainly commendable. But, to be fair, it’s low-hanging fruit. The FDCA needs much more comprehensive reform and must be made consistent with its authors’ pledge to respect the people’s right to self-medicate.

In our white paper “Drug Reformation,” Michael Cannon and I provide a laundry list of reform proposals, ranging from ending the FDA’s monopoly over deciding which drugs may be over-the-counter and which may be prescription-only, to allowing Americans to purchase drugs that have been approved by designated certification agencies, including foreign regulatory bodies. We point out:

According to one study, recognizing drug approvals by regulatory bodies in Canada and Europe between 2000 and 2010 would have given U.S. consumers quicker access to 37 “novel” drugs for which “no other FDA‐​approved prescription medicine had the same mechanism of action,” including 10 drugs treating mostly orphan diseases “for which no alternative therapy was available in the USA.” Such recognition would have allowed U.S. consumers to access those drugs a median of 13.6 months earlier.

We also suggest creating intermediate drug classifications, such as “behind the counter,” which would still require consumers to get permission from government-approved gatekeepers (pharmacists), but would let them avoid the costs of a visit to the doctor to get a prescription.

The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 is a timely demonstration of bipartisan FDA reform and a welcome reprieve for the puppies. Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, we can look back on its passage as the first in a long line of pharmaceutical regulatory reforms.