Public school teacher turned homeschooler turned education entrepreneur. We’re seeing this more and more these days, but it isn’t as new of a phenomenon as many might think. The late Cheryl Lowe, founder of Memoria Press and Highlands Latin School in Louisville, KY, is a perfect example.

Cheryl received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and master’s in biology; she taught chemistry and geometry in a public high school before having children. She taught her sons to read before they started school, but she wasn’t satisfied with the well-regarded public or private schools they eventually attended. She began researching the history of education to figure out what went wrong with education.

Cheryl became convinced of the importance of classical education in general and Latin in particular, so she began homeschooling her sons and offering a weekly Latin class for other children. Seeing the success her students were having, she compiled her materials into a course that could be used by families or schools.

Cheryl’s weekly Latin class eventually became Highlands Latin School (HLS), a private K–12 classical Christian school in Louisville that opened in 2000. And her course materials formed the basis for Memoria Press, a family-run publishing company that produces classical Christian education materials.

This unique partnership means Highlands Latin can function as a laboratory of sorts for Memoria Press curriculum. According to Shane Saxon, Director of Trademark Schools and Wholesale Distribution at Memoria Press, “every book is tested in actual classrooms with actual students before being sent out to schools.”

The success of Highlands Latin students and the Memoria Press curriculum brought a number of accolades to Cheryl Lowe. People began asking her for help to start similar schools. That’s where the trademark program that Shane Saxon leads comes in. “Only schools that are in lockstep with Highlands Latin—using Memoria Press curriculum and sharing the pedagogical values—are allowed to use the Highlands name,” he says.

While the educational requirements are strict, school leaders have a lot of flexibility in delivery. The HLS full-time model is four days a week. The school recommends Monday as the off day so students can catch up on homework—with the added bonus of avoiding the “Sunday blues.” There is also a cottage school model that takes a hybrid approach; students meet together one to three days a week and learn at home during the other days. Shane notes, “This model helps people marry the benefits of a traditional classroom and the benefits of homeschool.”

We’ve seen an explosion of microschools, hybrid schools, and homeschooling since COVID-19. But the seeds of this growth were planted by pioneers like Cheryl Lowe.

Payments amounting to $600 will soon need to be reported to the government, but the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will be postponing the implementation of the reporting requirement for one year. Although the requirement is not quite as invasive as when Congress was considering enacting surveillance on bank accounts with $600 in yearly activity, it’s not far off.

Acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell said, “The IRS and Treasury heard a number of concerns regarding the timeline of implementation of these changes under the American Rescue Plan. … The additional time will help reduce confusion during the upcoming 2023 tax filing season and provide more time for taxpayers to prepare and understand the new reporting requirements.”

Confusion over the implementation may be the reason cited, but the real problem is how intrusive this requirement is. Previously, the law only required reports to be made (via form 1099‑K) if an individual received more than 200 transactions that amounted to more than $20,000. Now, thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a single $600 payment or any combination of payments that add up to $600 in a year (e.g., ten $60 payments) will trip the requirements just the same.

In fact, the real confusion has been centered around just how this style of surveillance can be considered constitutional. Many have been left asking, “Why don’t Americans have stronger financial privacy rights?”

Unfortunately, laws, regulations, Supreme Court decisions, and even inflation have consistently chipped away at financial privacy for over 50 years. As I explained in a recent paper, even a law titled the “Right to Financial Privacy Act” failed to really deliver the level of privacy Americans should have—notably, the level most Americans thought the Constitution provided.

Americans may have a year to relax, but Congress should take this time to fix the issue. Not only should the reporting requirement be repealed to lessen the burden on Americans, but also more fundamental reforms should be enacted to establish financial privacy protections that Americans should have had from the beginning.

This week I left my job suing the government to join the Cato Institute as Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies. The reactions have been overwhelmingly positive and I’m thrilled to return to an organization I’ve long respected. Many are now asking why I chose to leave what I still describe as a dream job.

Some of my responses are conventional: I had been a civil rights attorney for ten years. Change is good. Litigation is all-consuming. And at some point, people seek new challenges. But I also came to believe I could be a more effective advocate for liberty if I worked outside of the courts. Here’s why.

For a variety of reasons that I’ll leave to future writings, courts have become a poor ally to civil rights litigants. A thicket of jurisdictional traps, immunity doctrines, standing rules, and other procedural hurdles often weed out even the most deserving civil rights plaintiffs from court. When a plaintiff is lucky enough to surmount these pitfalls and get a judge to weigh in on the merits of their claims, a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the judiciary has led judges to defer excessively to policymakers—the very people they’re supposed to protect our rights against.

This all takes place in the name of “democracy.” Unelected and unaccountable men and women in robes, we are told, should not thwart the will of the people. But the Framers established liberty, not democracy, as the guiding principle of our Constitution. They recognized that, as Benjamin Franklin quipped, democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for lunch. They therefore designed the judiciary as a counter-majoritarian bulwark against democratic excess.

So while it’s popular nowadays to say the Supreme Court wields too much power, even at its peak the judiciary is “the least dangerous” branch. It can’t make new laws. It can’t even enforce its own orders. Its only weapon is a defensive one: the power of judgment. It’s not the judiciary that’s regulating small bookstores out of business to protect the financial interests of Mark Hamill, or keeping special needs kids from getting care for its own bureaucratic convenience, or taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in home equity as punishment for the failure to pay $8 in taxes, or imposing massive fines for doing innocuous things like working on your car in your own driveway. It’s the democratic branch that is constantly “extending the sphere of its activity,” sucking all power “into its impetuous vortex,” and regulating everything from the demographic composition of corporate boards down to the graphics on a can of craft beer. The judiciary only has the power to undo those rights-violations.

But all too frequently, it doesn’t. Because democracy. Or because many judges view some rights as less deserving of protection than others. Or because the would-be plaintiff committed some obscure misstep in the kabuki-theater ritual of modern civil rights litigation. Or perhaps simply because a vast amount of judges are former government lawyers and still see the world through that lens.

Whatever the reason, that was my experience. And I decided that if civil rights plaintiffs were having so much difficulty finding a remedy in the courts after their rights were violated, maybe I was better equipped to help stop these abuses from happening in the first place.

So, how to do that? I’ve concluded that we must 1) describe the ideals animating our Constitution in a way that makes people want to defend them, and 2) get the judiciary back into the habit of judging. Both tasks require advocacy outside of the courts. Those of us who believe that the Constitution is a fundamentally libertarian document must not only convince people that it says what we believe it means, but also that its meaning is worth following.

And it is. Liberty allows people to exercise their ingenuity, to make world-changing innovations, to put food on the table by working in the profession of their choice, and to order their lives in the way that suits their own, unique needs. It allows a man with an eighth-grade education to build a small family business in Ohio so he can keep his kids and grandbabies close to home. It allows an accordionist in Houston to bring joy to passersby while earning a little extra cash for himself. It allows a woman with few means and little skills to earn money arranging flowers in a local grocery store. It allows people to escape the circumstances of their birth. There’s a reason the libertarian ideals of freedom and equality have been the rallying cry of civil rights leaders throughout history. When we erase these liberties from the Constitution—or at least subject them to a laughably low level of judicial protection—we rip the pursuit of happiness away, often from the people who need opportunity most.

In short, we have to, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “fight for the things [we] care about” in a way that will “lead others to join,”­—the public, legislators, and judges included. And that’s what I intend to do in my new role at Cato.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing to significantly increase its fees to process various immigration-related applications. The agency is largely funded through applicant fees, and the fees are supposed to reflect the cost of processing an application. Along with the new fees, the federal register notice details the time that USCIS adjudicators spend reviewing each application. This is not the processing times that applicants spend waiting for someone to look at their application. Instead, this is how long it takes an adjudicator to issue a decision on an application from the time they get around to looking at it.

From these adjudication times, we can say that USCIS plans to charge fees ranging from as little as $105.99 per hour to as much as $3,033.33 per hour, depending on the type of application. The average fee per hour (for forms requiring fees) will increase from $554.13 per hour to $814.16 per hour. The highest fee—on an hourly basis—is $3,033.33 per hour for an I‑90 application to renew or replace a green card. In that case, the agency will charge $455 for 9 minutes of work. This is followed closely by an employment authorization document (EAD) application at $2,954.55 per hour (if filed on paper, as is usually required and often necessary anyway). The agency will charge $650 for 13.2 minutes of work on an EAD.

The agency doesn’t give a precise estimate for online EAD review time, but even there, the charge will exceed $2,500 per hour. The agency plans to charge $2,172.41 per hour to process an I‑131 application for a travel document. The EAD and I‑131 are among the most commonly filed USCIS applications. The agency will now charge $1,614.29 hourly to review requests for specific (or named) H‑2A farm workers (it will charge less if the worker is only specifically named later when applying for a visa with the State Department).

Private immigration attorneys also operate on a fee-for-service model, and while attorney fees vary widely between firms and types of service, one authority states, “If the lawyer quotes an hourly rate instead, expect to pay between $150 and $600 per hour.” Another gives a range of $200 to $500 per hour. Another gives hourly rates of $150 to $300. USCIS plans to charge a fee of more than $500 per hour for more than two thirds of the forms requiring a fee. Private attorney fees are also not really comparable to USCIS fees because the attorney’s job is a much more qualitatively difficult than the job of a USCIS adjudicator.

USCIS must increase fees (to some degree) to cover the cost of humanitarian applications that do not require fees. But this doesn’t fully explain the extreme variation in the cost-per-hour for adjudication between different types of applications. The higher per-hour charges cannot be explained by more complex applications either since the highest per-hour charges are for some of the easiest forms to adjudicate. USCIS admits in some places that it is intentionally charging more to some applicants than to others because it deems them to have more ability to pay. It is also charging less than what it deems to be the true cost for a naturalization application because it believes naturalization is a benefit to the country.

These extremely high per-hour charges are all the more astounding considering that USCIS adjudicators are also taking more time to review forms than in the past. Adjudicators are taking more time reviewing 82 percent of forms in 2023 than they took in earlier years, and the resulting delays mean that the agency will need an additional 3.3 million man-hours to process its backlog. The longer it takes to review a form, the lower the per-hour charge becomes even though the lower per-hour charge just reflects lower inefficiency, not a real benefit to customers.

For instance, the largest proposed fee in 2023 will be for the I‑956 Application For Regional Center Designation under the EB‑5 investor visa program: $47,695, up from $17,795. But USCIS says that it takes 108.5 hours to review, so the charge ($439.59/hour) almost seems reasonable compared with other forms. But in 2019, USCIS said that it took only 34.95 hours to process an Application For Regional Center Designation. If the adjudicators were still processing at the same speed, the per-hour charge would be $1,365 per hour. In other words, the situation is much worse than Table 1 implies.

USCIS is charging more money for less efficient work. It is not surprising that it is taking adjudicators much longer to process forms because the length of the forms keeps growing. The average form length has increased from about 3 pages in 2003—when the agency started—to about 10 pages in 2022.

USCIS should be eliminating the number of required applications and streamlining the process through electronic filing. The “discounts” for online filing that it plans on introducing hardly compensate applicants who must spend much more time using USCIS’s difficult online application portals, and regardless, online filing will remain unavailable for many types of forms. USCIS is moving too slowly to create a modern immigration system.

Update: The table was updated to reflect that the H‑1B fee would be $600 higher than previously listed as a result of a separate Asylum Program Fee in the rule. This increased the average fee amount from $801.30 to $814.16.

There’s an iconic scene in the movie Spinal Tap where lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, reacting to a production error that has rendered the band’s latest record album an unadorned black square, exclaims, “There’s something about this that’s so black, it’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none, none more black.” Last Wednesday’s op-ed in the New York Times by self-styled “digital ethics” adviser and privacy-skeptic Reid Blackman evokes a similar response: How much more wrong could this piece be? The answer is none, none more wrong.

Blackman’s thesis—that while the ability to speak privately “can be beneficial,” we should condemn technologies that wholly preclude government eavesdropping—could only resonate in a socio-political environment of complacency and overconfidence, where the blood-spattered streets of Tehran, Hong Kong, and Moscow are as much of an abstraction as our own government’s serial predations against slavery abolitionists, civil-rights leaders, whistleblowers, journalists, and countless others. Contra Blackman, we should celebrate the advent of technologies and applications that enable people to speak to one another freely, secure in the knowledge that what they choose to say privately cannot be heard by others, no matter how much various government actors may wish to discourage, punish, prevent, tax, or otherwise exploit those communications. The ability to communicate privately is a paramount value in any liberal society because without it those in positions of power will inevitably—inevitably—claim a monopoly on truth and do everything in their power to suppress dissent.

Blackman’s argument, such as it is, runs like this: Yes, privacy is good, and sometimes it is worth protecting the ability of two parties to communicate privately and securely, such as journalists with (certain?) confidential sources. But because secure communications can facilitate the misdeeds of such bad actors as terrorists, insurrectionists, and child-abusers, it is “morally dangerous” to elevate the value of privacy “above all.” Instead, we should have greater faith in “good governance” and confidence that if we ensure government actors are able to intercept communications at will, they will exercise that power, if not perfectly, then certainly in a way that does more good than harm.

Not surprisingly, the Founders of this country—whose successful defiance of British tyranny depended significantly on secure communications (“One if by land, two if by sea!”)—embraced a radically different view of government and categorically rejected the reductive utilitarianism of Blackman’s argument for a panoptic state.

Thus, the First Amendment states unequivocally that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech.” The ability to speak freely necessarily entails the ability to speak securely, and therefore any law requiring that all communications (or subset of communications, such as email, text messages, or chat apps) be accessible to the government upon demand would plainly “abridge” the freedom of speech, which the Constitution expressly forbids.

Moreover, our history is replete with examples of governments seeking to perpetuate monstrous institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow by ferreting out dissenters, infiltrating their associations, and above all preventing the spread of destabilizing ideas by making it dangerous to speak them out loud.

The federal government’s obsession with Americans’ financial activities and information may not be as nakedly tyrannical as slavery or Jim Crow, but it is potentially just as dangerous to Americans’ rights. Thus, the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 ushered in record-keeping and reporting requirements for financial firms that culminated in warrantless access to Americans’ financial transactions. The federal government has increasingly weaponized the financial system, and countless federal officials—including members of Congress, their staffs, and agency employees—approach policy much like Blackman. Rather than treat privacy as the baseline, they treat it as something that governments should define and grant to certain people. Blackman is concerned that Signal doesn’t really give us “more freedom,” but that’s not the point. The point of a tool like Signal is to protect our “unalienable rights,” particularly to privacy and freedom of expression.

As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The history of government surveillance is an ugly one, replete with false assurances, broken promises, and martyrs who spoke truth to power at the cost of their lives. We can honor those sacrifices by avoiding the very mistakes that occasioned them.

Immigrants and U.S. sponsors are waiting longer than ever to receive responses to their applications to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the agency has released a new proposed rule today that would dramatically increase fees for most applications to help process them quicker. But data in that rule reveal one important reason why processing times are increasing, and it has nothing to do with money: for 82 percent of form types, USCIS adjudicators are simply spending more time reviewing the form than in the past, leading to a backup of applications sitting at the agency without anyone to look at them. As a result of the longer review times, it will take USCIS more than 3.3 million additional man-hours to process its backlog.

The processing time that applicants feel is how long it takes to find out the outcome of their request. As I have previously documented, the average of the median processing times across all forms for which DHS-USCIS reports data increased threefold—from less than 4 months in 2012 to over a year in 2022. However, the 80th percentile at the most‐​delayed locations was more than double the average at 27 months, and 20 percent of applicants at those locations waited even longer.

But another type of processing time is even more important: the time it takes for an adjudicator to review the application after they pick it up. This “review time” is how long it takes an adjudicator to issue a decision on an application from the time they start looking at it, not the total time that the application is with the agency (including all the time it takes for someone to finally look at it). These review times are measured in hours or minutes, not months and years, but any time that is added to the review time can balloon when multiplied across millions of applications.

Table 1 shows the time per completion for 2023, 2019, 2016, and 2010 for the forms that USCIS reported. USCIS is spending more money to take longer to adjudicate forms. 2023 was the best year for adjudication time for just nine forms, which are mostly less common forms (with the notable exception of the I‑90 form). Adjudicators were taking longer than one of the prior years for the other 42 forms (82 percent of the forms), and for 34 forms, adjudicators were taking longer than they were as recently as 2019. The 42 forms that are taking longer account for 86 percent of USCIS’s backlog (for which review times are reported).

Take one example. The largest proposed fee in 2023 will be for the I‑956 Application For Regional Center Designation under the EB‑5 investor visa program: $47,695, up from $17,795. USCIS says that it takes 108.5 hours to review, but in 2019, USCIS said that it took only 34.95 hours to process an Application For Regional Center Designation. USCIS is saying that its adjudicators are now taking nearly three times as long, and it wants nearly three times the money.

But it’s not just investor-related applications. The I‑129 for L‑1 temporary workers, for instance, is taking adjudicators over 1 hour and 20 minutes longer to process in 2023 than in 2019. In an agency where every additional minute can be multiplied by tens of thousands of applications, the fact that the agency keeps moving backwards on so many forms results in a massive decline in efficiency

USCIS spends over 5 hours on each asylum application, which is longer than any other non-investor-related application. This is an hour more than they spent per-application in 2019, but even four hours would be far longer than they should be spending. It spends just 2 hours per green card application. The problem is that adjudicators are looking for reasons to deny asylum applications rather than looking for whether applicants meet the criteria.

The consequence of the longer reviews is that it will take nearly 10 million man-hours to process the existing USCIS backlog—over 3.3 million more man-hours than if USCIS was processing every application as fast as it has in the past. This is the equivalent of USCIS needing to hire 1,605 more employees just to keep the backlog from growing.

This level of inefficiency is unacceptable. The agency needs to change from a “get-to-no” culture to one where customer service and processing efficiency is paramount. The agency must impose metrics that encourage efficiency and hold adjudicators accountable. It should start with disclosing statistics on the performance of each adjudicator.

One major reason for the slower processing times is that the agency has greatly increased the lengths of its forms from fewer than 200 pages total to more than 700 pages total from 2003 to 2023. Every additional page means more time for the adjudicators to review the application. USCIS needs to cut back on the red tape and focus on streamlining applications. USCIS has made improvements under this administration, but not enough to justify a significant fee increase.

In the final days of 2022, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s infamous cryptocurrency reporting requirements were being put on hold. While this sudden change is far more welcome than when Congress wrote the law seemingly overnight in late 2021, the temporary pause shouldn’t distract from the fact that the reporting requirements should be repealed entirely.

A Quick Refresher on the Infrastructure Act

As the name suggests, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was primarily written with the supposed intention of rebuilding roads, bridges, railways, ports, and the like. Yet to do so, the sprawling 1,039-page bill needed pay-for provisions to offset the spending. Therefore, in the Fall of 2021, Congress slipped in a provision with two amendments targeting the cryptocurrency market. The Joint Committee on Taxation initially estimated that this change would drum up some $28 billion in tax revenue—a number later revised down to just $2 billion.

The first amendment changed 26 U.S. Code § 6045 (the “broker definition”) to label not just traditional exchanges (e.g., Coinbase, Robinhood, etc.) as brokers but also cryptocurrency miners and even software developers. In doing so, the amendment requires said brokers to report the name and address of each person, or “customer,” they interact with. However, an immediate problem with this requirement is that miners simply do not have access to that information. Therefore, by mandating that they report what they cannot possibly offer, the amendment effectively bans cryptocurrency mining in the United States.

The second amendment changed 26 U.S. Code § 6050I to require anyone engaged in a business transaction of $10,000 or more in cryptocurrency to report the transaction to the IRS. The report must include the name and address of the payer, as well as their taxpayer identification number, the amount paid, the date, and the nature of the transaction. Failure to file a report within 15 days, reporting incorrect information, or missing information may result in a $25,000 fine or five years in prison. Unfortunately, the IRS failed to address this section in its announcement. 

The Blockchain Association, Coin Center, Proof of Stake Alliance, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many others raised the alarm when the cryptocurrency reporting requirements were first slipped into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Across the board, these critiques have made it clear that this law should never have been written in the first place. Put simply, the reporting requirements are unjustified and unconstitutional.

Solutions on the Table

While the law should not have been enacted and it should not have survived this long, many solutions have emerged over the past 17 months. Representatives Patrick McHenry (R‑NC) and Tim Ryan (D‑OH), and Senators Ted Cruz (R‑TX), Cynthia Lummis (R‑WY), and Ron Wyden (D‑OR) have all introduced different pieces of legislation to address the problem. Now that the 118th Congress is getting ready to get off the ground, it should take this time to move forward before the IRS does.