As 2022 winds down, it is worth noting that it has now been ten years since the United States entered into a free trade agreement (FTA) with new trading partners. Despite claims that the United States is a “hyperglobalist,” the reality is much different. In fact, as Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics noted in his excellent Foreign Affairs essay last year, the United States has been withdrawing from international economic integration for about 20 years. The consequences of a stagnant trade agenda will become more apparent and pronounced as time passes.

In 2012, U.S. FTAs with Korea, Colombia, and Panama, respectively, entered into force. Since that time, new liberalization has become non-existent. Though several mistakes were made along the way, the Obama administration at least tried to pursue an ambitious negotiating agenda. Most notably, it negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with a number of Pacific Rim nations, an increasingly vital part of the world both economically and strategically. Once the Trump administration entered into office, it immediately withdrew from the promising pact – an enormous unforced error. After the United States withdrew from TPP, the remaining members consummated the agreement and renamed it the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s oversaw a disastrous trade agenda: aside from withdrawing from TPP, it imposed bogus “national security” tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from virtually every country in the world, including longstanding military allies, which raised prices, hurt manufacturing, and alienated trading partners; engaged in a reckless trade war with China, which imposed enormous costs on the economy while failing to discipline the legitimate challenges posed by Beijing’s international economic practices; and rewrote the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in a more protectionist direction.

Today, the Biden administration has shown no interest in liberalization. While the U.S. dithers – the United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai recently called FTAs a “very 20^th century tool,” a stunning admission from the head of the agency tasked with tearing down trade barriers around the globe – the rest of the world clearly is moving on.

Whereas once the United States used its dominant position in the global economy to liberalize trade, create vital institutions and rules like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is now clearly retreating from further international economic leadership. Others are filling the void. China, Taiwan, post-Brexit United Kingdom, and Ecuador have all recently applied to join the CPTPP. Likewise, the Beijing-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has gone into effect. The WTO’s maintains a database of regional trade agreements entered into by various WTO members. Indeed, a cursory glance confirms a massive proliferation of such agreements over the last 20 years.

To be clear, regional free trade agreements are not costless. They promote what economists call “trade diversion”, which occurs when trade is diverted from a more efficient exporter to a less efficient exporter simply by the creation of a preferential (or discriminatory) free trade agreement or customs union –what the famed trade economist Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati called “termites in the trading system.” Still, these agreements are preferable to no liberalization at all.

Over the years, Cato scholars have argued U.S. policymakers should simply unilaterally eliminate trade barriers irrespective of what other countries do. If that is politically impossible, then the U.S. and countries around the world should negotiate multilateral agreements within the WTO system so the basic non-discrimination principle applies between all members. Since the Doha Round effectively collapsed in 2008–2009, widespread liberalization within the WTO system has been dormant. The WTO system is plagued by a requirement that multilateral liberalization be unanimous, which has proven to a major hurdle. Another avenue for liberalization is through plurilateral negotiations through the WTO system – that is, agreements with some, but not all, WTO members. As my Cato colleague and former chief judge of the WTO’s Appellate Body, the highest court of world trade, has written, plurilaterals offer the best way forward for liberalization within the WTO system. There are ongoing plurilateral negotiations over trade in so-called “green goods”—such as wind turbines, solar water heaters, etc.—as well as digital trade. Still, these negotiations have been slow. That leaves free trade agreements, both regional and bilateral, outside of the WTO system as the only active way to cut trade barriers. In the past, U.S. pursuit of regional and bilateral free trade agreements has prompted action within the WTO system. For example, NAFTA helped spur action to complete the Uruguay Round, which converted the GATT into the WTO system.

As Posen noted last year, the U.S. trade-to-GDP ratio has risen more slowly than the global average – increasing from 20 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2008—and “[i]t fell at the same rate as the world at large’s during the financial crisis, but it has yet to recover.” Posen argues it’s natural for the U.S. to have a lower trade-to-GDP ratio than much of the world given its large, diverse economy separated by major oceans, but it should be liberalizing at roughly the same rate as the rest of the world, which it is not.

So, what are the long term consequences of an atrophying trade agenda? First, U.S. consumers will pay more for goods and services than they would otherwise. Likewise, despite the pervasive myth, a non-existent trade agenda will lower real wages since increased trade tends to promote specialization and enhance productivity. Over time, it will mean a less innovative and dynamic ecosystem for existing firms who are shielded from foreign competition. Next, U.S. firms will lose access to markets abroad since they will face higher trade—both tariff and non-tariff—barriers and competitors in other parts of the world with more free trade agreements meet those demands.

In less concrete terms but arguably just as important, the U.S. will lose a vital tool of soft power to set standards around the world in emerging areas vital for the 21^st century economy. Near-peer competitors like China will surely fill the void. Finally, the U.S. will forfeit the prestige and respect it earned after World War II when policymakers wisely leveraged America’s status as the world’s lone super power to create the modern trading system that exists today, which has paid enormous dividends both economically and strategically. Indeed, as Gary Hufbauer and Zhiyao Lu of the Peterson Institute noted in a 2017 study, “the payoff to the United States from trade expansion—stemming from policy liberalization and improved transportation and communications technology—from 1950 to 2016 is roughly 2.1 trillion (measured in 2016 dollars). It further concludes that U.S. GDP per capita and GDP per household accordingly increased by $7,014 and $18,131 respectively (both measured in 2016 dollars.” Still, Hufbauer and Lu note, “liberalization still has a long way to go; the potential gains from future policy liberalization could be as large as $540 billion for the United States by the year 2025,” which would translate into an additional increase in GDP per capita of about $1700 and $4,400 in GDP per capita.”

Simply put, we cannot afford another decade of a decaying trade agenda.

Congress has spent a combined $1 trillion through supplemental appropriations over the last five years in inflation-adjusted 2021 dollars. While most of the supplemental spending since 2020 was in response to COVID-19, supplemental appropriations are on the rise over the long term (chart below).

Supplemental appropriations are primarily emergency spending that falls outside of regular budgeting procedures. Congress is increasingly using crises as justifications to spend more. Now, the Biden administration has asked Congress to tack on an additional $85 billion in emergency spending to discretionary appropriations that are set to expire after December 23. Congress needs an enforceable rule requiring offsetting spending reductions to increases in supplemental spending. This would effectively limit emergency spending growth.

Most funding in supplemental appropriations is designated as emergency funding. However, what qualifies as an emergency is not well-defined. Congress has enormous latitude in determining what appropriations it designates as emergency funding. Congress is increasingly relying on supplemental appropriations to fund ongoing government priorities. Supplemental bills often include funding for projects that are neither unforeseen nor urgent. For example:

• The 2013 supplemental responding to Hurricane Sandy included money for improved weather forecasting which, while related to the issue of hurricanes, represented forward-looking funding that should be considered during regular appropriations. It also included money for salmon fisheries in Alaska, to fund a train service expansion into New York, and to preserve historic properties.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has increasingly relied on supplementals to provide money for the Disaster Relief Fund. That account should be fully funded as part of regular appropriations based on trends in the occurrence and size of natural disasters.
• Congress often appropriates so-called “no-year” funding that is available until spent. True emergency funding should respond to immediate needs, not linger in agency accounts until some future time.

Moreover, rushing funding out the door is more likely to lead to wasteful spending. The Government Accountability Office identified significant fraud, waste, and mismanagement of COVID-19 emergency funding. As Brian Riedl with the Manhattan Institute reported: “A Florida man fraudulently used a $7.2 million emergency loan to purchase a 12,579-square-foot mansion and several cars. A California couple fraudulently collected $18 million and purchased ‘three houses, diamonds, gold coins, luxury watches, expensive furniture and other valuables.’ Another man forged enough applications to collect $27 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds.”

A brief history of emergency spending sheds light on more recent developments. The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (BEA) formalized the process for enacting emergency spending. Congress intended emergency appropriations to deal with unforeseen and urgent emergencies. If such a crisis occurred after Congress had enacted annual appropriations, emergency supplemental spending would allow for swift crisis response.

As part of the BEA, Congress also implemented caps on discretionary spending (programs for which Congress appropriates funding annually) along with a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) requirement for mandatory spending (programs with permanent appropriations that receive irregular reviews). PAYGO requires that all new mandatory spending be offset with other mandatory spending cuts or revenue increases.

While emergency spending was functionally exempted from these controls, the expiration of the BEA in the early 2000s coincided with an explosion in the usage and size of supplemental appropriations. Some commentators argue that political polarization has also been rising rapidly since the early 2000s, which may be one reason why Congress is increasingly relying on supplemental bills to fund non-emergency priorities.

During the 2000s, Congress used supplementals to fund wars in the Middle East, rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, and stimulate the economy following the Great Recession. The resulting higher deficits and the rise of the Tea Party motivated Congress to negotiate the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA). The BCA imposed new limits on discretionary spending while allowing for emergency funding for natural disaster relief. The BCA therefore enabled Congress to use emergency designations as part of the regular appropriations process. While supplemental spending was temporarily curbed, emergency spending exempt from discretionary spending limits merely found another outlet in appropriations bills.

This week, Congress is considering President Biden’s request for an additional $85 billion in emergency funding as part of a possible $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package. The administration has requested $10 billion for COVID-19, $38 billion for Ukraine aid, and $37 billion to respond to natural disasters. Congress should reject a last-minute, lame-duck emergency supplemental that will drive up deficits and debt.

Legislators should instead include additional discretionary spending within agreed-upon discretionary topline spending levels and ensure additional mandatory spending will be subject to budget rules such as PAYGO. As mentioned above, including additional mandatory spending under the PAYGO rule requires it to be offset with other mandatory spending cuts or tax increases.

To limit emergency spending growth in the future, Congress should consider adopting notional emergency spending accounts to track supplemental appropriations and require future offsets. This is a promising approach that has worked in Switzerland. When a crisis arises, Swiss legislators have access to an emergency spending valve. Yet all such supplemental spending is tracked in a notional account which requires offsetting spending reductions in future years. This limits the propensity to abuse emergency spending for other priorities.

The increasing reliance on supplemental appropriations for emergencies reduces congressional oversight, evades spending limits, and avoids the trade-off considerations such rules are intended to impose, thus leading to more wasteful spending. Congress should adopt comprehensive budget controls in 2023, including establishing long-overdue limits on emergency spending.

A New York Times piece last week explored how expensive, national childcare chains are thriving, while millions of ordinary American families struggle to get the care they want or need.

The chains such as Bright Horizons and KinderCare provide attentive services: “Parents often receive hourly updates: the exact time a baby dirtied a diaper; the number of raspberries a toddler ate at snack time, photos of 3‑year-olds at the playground.” But with charges of up to $40,000 per year in Manhattan or $44,000 in Seattle, these are “generally expanding in higher-income neighborhoods, while the greatest need for services is elsewhere — particularly in rural areas and low-income communities of color.”

Indeed, there is a supply squeeze for affordable childcare across many localities. The industry has lost 80,000 workers since 2020, contributing to the closure of 12,000 programs. Operating on razor thin profits margins, most care centers are reeling from a worker exodus, driven by post-pandemic career changes and the competition for workers from more expensive providers. The result is widespread dissatisfaction at the high cost and limited availability of care that parents need.

The Times article, naturally, talks up the case for more federal demand subsidies as a response, which is what President Biden wanted to deliver through his original Build Back Better plan. But as my chapter in the recent Cato book Empowering the New American Worker makes clear, the high cost of childcare and its lack of accessibility is in part caused by existing government regulations, which enshrine the preferences of wealthier families to the detriment of the poor.

Empirical research confirms that stringent staff‐​to‐​child ratios in some states substantially increase childcare prices with little beneficial effect on various measures of childcare quality. By increasing the cost of providing care, these regulations reduce its availability in low-income areas, in which demand is more sensitive to price rises.

State-level educational requirements for childcare staff further restrict the number of potential childcare workers, driving up the price of care further. Many state and local governments also consider home daycares a “problem use” and have used zoning restrictions to ban them. That’s before we consider federal immigration restrictions, which bar many potential childcare workers, or other options, such as au pairs and babysitters, from even entering the country.

Instead of just throwing more federal taxpayer dollars at the childcare sector, local, state and federal governments should reform these policies to increase the supply of childcare and reduce its price. Childcare could be a truly pluralistic market, with lots of options — including everything from formal educational centers right through to simple share arrangements between groups of parents. Different work patterns and children’s needs mean that in a truly open market, there would be huge variety on offer.

Unfortunately, the momentum is in the opposite direction, with campaigners pushing for a formalization of the sector, with childcare seen as an arm of education policy. A lot of higher income households and politicians have convinced themselves that intense care provided in formal centers with extensively educated carers and expensive learning equipment constitutes “high quality” care that will improve the cognitive development of children. Policymakers want to entrench these preferences by tightening government regulations over who can care, and how. In Washington DC, for example, many childcarers will need college degrees from 2023.

This approach is not only empirically dubious, but, if rolled out more broadly, would have extremely regressive effects. Poorer families are often balancing other important concerns that can affect children’s wellbeing when deciding on their care options. If a job opportunity comes up that could really improve the incomes of a household and so the life-chances of its children, having access to an affordable childcare environment with flexible enough hours to facilitate that work is much more important to the family than carers having a degree. Yet these very regulations make childcare less affordable and less accessible in just these circumstances.

Indeed, what a lot of these regulations do is enshrine the preferences of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. If many rich households desire intense learning environments for their kids, the market will serve them. But efforts to insist that all childcare environments must follow suit is misguided.

Those who use these high-end services should be careful about attempting to mandate their own preferences. The Times piece explains that some of the biggest childcare consortia were publicly very supportive of Biden’s original plan to cap childcare payments at 7 percent of family income for most families. However, in private they had severe reservations about the proposals — worrying that the federal spending level would not cover the cost of expanding their services to more households.

This fear is not misplaced. It has happened in countries that have provided universal subsidies. A lot of UK childcare providers have struggled as their government has expanded eligibility for “free” care to more households, because providers were left with fewer and fewer opportunities to charge non-eligible households higher prices to stay profitable, given the government’s low rates.

If we are not careful, we are hurtling towards The Road to Serfdom, Childcare Edition here. First, we constrain the supply of childcare through various regulations. Next, subsidies are demanded for vast numbers of households due to the subsequent high cost of childcare. Then subsidies will lead to all sorts of dysfunction to the supply-side of the market as the government caps what it’s willing to pay and seeks to control how care is provided. Then everyone will bemoan “market failure” and push for publicly provided childcare centers…

As expected, today the House January 6 Select Committee held a nearly two-hour public business meeting at which it approved four criminal referrals on former President Donald Trump to the Department of Justice. The specific alleged statutory violations were:

1. Obstruction of an Official Proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c))
2. Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371)
3. Conspiracy to Make a False Statement (18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001)
4. “Incite,” “Assist” or “Aid and Comfort” an Insurrection (18 U.S.C. § 2383)

The Select Committee also voted to approve its final report without amendment and transmit it to the full House and the public printer. It is expected that the full report, likely accompanied by substantial supporting materials, will be issued later this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday.

In the 154+ page Executive Summary released today, the committee made the following observation on p. 48 about domestic intelligence collection in the pre-January 6, 2021 period as it pertained to President Trump:

No intelligence collection was apparently performed on President Trump’s plans for January 6th, nor was there any analysis performed on what he might do to exacerbate potential violence. Certain Republican members of Congress who were working with Trump and the Giuliani team may have had insight on this particular risk, but none appear to have alerted the Capitol Police or any other law enforcement authority.

The violence and attempted obstruction of the certification of the 2020 presidential election results that happened on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol was clearly not First Amendment protected activity. But this insinuation—that federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies should have targeted the communications of a still-sitting chief executive while his legal appeals were making their way through federal courts—is deeply disturbing.

Trump’s public calls for his supporters to rally in DC in support of him and his court appeals were, by themselves, clearly First Amendment protected activities. We will learn later this week whether the Select Committee’s soon-to-be-revealed legislative recommendations include a call for some kind of expanded domestic surveillance authorities that may be at odds with the First and Fourth Amendments.

I’m a little late with this Christmas gift recommendation that I’ve made before. But if you’re still looking for a last-minute idea, I’ve checked: online booksellers can still deliver paperbacks before Christmas, and of course ebooks are ready instantly.

I decided one year to give a young colleague a post-graduate course in political science and economics — P. J. O’Rourke’s books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich. So I went to my local Barnes & Noble to search for them. Not in Current Affairs. Not in Economics. No separate section called Politics. I decided to try Borders (RIP). But first — to avoid yet more driving around — I went online to see if my local Borders stores had them in stock. Sure enough, they did, in a couple of stores just blocks from the Cato Institute. Checking to see where in the store I would find them, I discovered that they would both be shelved under “Humor–Humorous Writing.” Oh, right, I thought, they’re not books on economics or current affairs, they’re humor.

Yes, P.J. was one of the funniest writers around. But what people often miss when they talk about his humor is what a good reporter and what an insightful analyst he was. Parliament of Whores is a very funny book, but it’s also a very perceptive analysis of politics in a modern mixed-economy democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich, you’ll learn more about how countries get rich — and why they don’t — than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I’ve decided that the best answer to the question “What’s the best book to start learning economics?” is Eat the Rich.

On page 1, P.J. starts with the right question: “Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?” Supply-and-demand curves are all well and good, but what we really want to know is how not to be mired in poverty. He writes that he tried returning to his college economics texts but quickly remembered why he hated them at the time — though he does attempt, for instance, to explain comparative advantage in terms of John Grisham and Courtney Love. Instead he decided to visit economically successful and unsuccessful societies and try to figure out what makes them work or not work. So he headed off to Sweden, Hong Kong, Albania, Cuba, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Wall Street.

In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and he gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot better than humans in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes, the real answer is the collective “ujamaa” policies pursued by the sainted post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is “ujaama—they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy.”

From Tanzania P.J. moves on to Hong Kong, where he finds “the best contemporary example of laissez-faire.…The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.”

You could do worse than to take a semester-long course on political economy where the texts are Eat the Rich and Parliament of Whores. So, bookstore owners, leave them in the Humorous Writing section for sure, but also put copies in the Economics, Politics, and Current Affairs sections.

Still time to buy them for Christmas and educate all your family and friends while they think they’re just being entertained!

If the past is any indication, Americans will go on for years debating whether the method prescribed by the U.S. Constitution for selecting presidents, the Electoral College, should give way to some version of a national popular vote. (Cato scholars have long criticized one such attempted version, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.)

For those who wish the Electoral College well as an institution, the best prospect for keeping it intact is for it to work smoothly, predictably, and as intended by the Framers, the voters, and the responsible officials in the states. And that’s among the best reasons to want to update and clarify the creaky Electoral Count Act of 1887, as Congress is currently doing.

Thus argues Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) in a cogent opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Sen. Paul notes that the College’s remarkable institutional survival has benefited from a willingness to tinker and improve at the margins from time to time. “For example, the 12th Amendment provided for separate electoral votes for President and Vice President, a solution required after the controversial elections of 1796 and 1800.” The timing of the process, one might add, has also undergone repeated revision, reflecting among other factors advances in communication and transportation speeds.

Unfortunately, as Sen. Paul explains, as time went on, defects in tabulation procedures spelled out by Congress 135 years ago left ambiguities ripe for exploitation by both parties. That includes the role of the Vice President in counting electoral votes and the “incredibly low threshold – just one member of the House and Senate – [needed] to object to a state’s election results.” From “political theater,” these games descended to something worse on Jan. 6, 2021. It should be noted that Sen. Paul refused to join eight Senate colleagues who voted against certifying electors that day, explaining in a tweet at the time, “The vote today is not a protest; the vote today is literally to overturn the election! Voting to overturn state-certified elections would be the opposite of what states’ rights Republicans have always advocated for.”

That’s a crucial and underappreciated point: ECA revision, at least in its current Congressional form, has proven to be originalist and federalist in spirit, aiming to protect states in their rightful role against usurpation as well as to protect voters from machinations that would set aside their choices. As Sen. Paul writes, “this legislation preserves the Founders’ intent that the laws and election results of the several states are respected.” And as a matter of political realism, “conservatives should realize that reforming the Electoral Count Act is necessary to protect the Electoral College” from those who would seize on a failure in its procedures as reason to abandon it entirely.

Exactly so.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is facing an unprecedented backlog of immigration cases. Nearly 9 million applications across a variety of categories were pending in 2022, an entire year’s worth of submissions. One reason that it is taking the agency more resources to process applications is that it has dramatically lengthened the forms that it requires.

From 2003—when the agency began—until 2022, the total length of the USCIS immigration forms grew from 193 pages to 701 pages—an increase of 508 pages (Figure 1). The average form length grew from about 3 pages to about 10 pages—a 217-percent increase. From 2003 to 2008, the agency added 81 pages (14 per year). From 2008 to 2016, it added 213 pages (24 per year). From 2016 to 2022, it added 214 pages (31 per year). All page counts exclude the length of the form directions, but the form directions have also exploded in length. To allow easier comparisons across years, they also generally exclude supplemental forms, meaning that the true form page count would be even higher.

Table 1 shows the data on which Figure 1 is based. Of the 71 forms considered, the agency has increased the length of nearly every form. Only one form that was in use throughout the entire period of 2003 to 2022 did not increase (the rather unusual form I‑687, Application for Status as a Temporary Resident). In other words, 99 percent of USCIS’s forms either grew longer or were created since 2003. Even the forms that were created during this time have grown. Overall, 93 percent of forms have grown longer since their creation.

The Form I‑212 (Application for Permission to Reapply for Admission into the United States After Deportation or Removal) has increased the most in percentage terms: 1,000 percent from 1 page to 11 pages. The Form I‑130 petition for alien spouse (now with I‑130A) has increased 800 percent from 2 pages to 18 pages. In absolute terms, the form that saw the biggest growth was the I‑129 form, petition for a nonimmigrant worker, which added 26 pages. The agency also added 16 pages to the form I‑485, adjustment of status to legal permanent residence.

The longer forms take longer for the agency to process because it must manually enter and review every question response—no matter how trivial. In August 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported:

According to staff we interviewed from four of eight USCIS field locations, longer forms increased the amount of time it takes for staff to adjudicate applications and petitions, and resulted in longer interviews, since adjudicators were to collect and confirm additional information.… USCIS added questions to the Application to Register Permanent Residence (Form I‑485) regarding the applicant’s parents, marital history, and past application history. With respect to the Petition for Alien Relative (Form I‑130), USCIS added questions related to the petitioner’s background, biographical information, parents, current or former spouses, and the petitioner’s addresses and employment history for the previous 5 years.

USCIS also added questions to the I‑485 form that request a potentially enormous quantity of information. For instance, one question states:

Have you EVER been arrested, cited, charged, or detained for any reason by any law enforcement official (including but not limited to any U.S. immigration official or any official of the U.S. armed forces or U.S. Coast Guard)?

The form does not define the word “detained” which could potentially encompass any border crossing in the entire world, any traffic stop in the world, etc. Documenting this type of information is an extreme imposition on any applicant, but there is also no doubt that the agency is being flooded with massive quantities of useless documentation because of this single question.

It is worth emphasizing that no significant immigration reform has become law during the last two decades. The agency is unilaterally imposing dramatic increases in the bureaucratic obstacles to immigration benefits without input from Congress. But the hundreds of new pages of information is also making the agency less efficient at its job, delaying applications and causing backlogs to grow to unimaginable lengths (Figure A).