The ninth edition of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers is published online today. A print edition will arrive in due course, but we wanted to make it available now for current and newly elected members of Congress. The Handbook has been published periodically since 1995, to coincide with presidential or midterm elections. In this edition’s 77 chapters my Cato Institute colleagues offer hundreds of policy suggestions for members of Congress, agency and administration officials, and state policymakers. Many chapters propose big, systemic changes that would address fundamental policy problems. Other chapters, and sometimes the same ones, offer very detailed, specific ideas for policy improvement.

The last two editions of this Handbook, published after the elections of 2008 and 2016, observed that whatever one thought of the results of the election, we could take some satisfaction in observing that something normal happened: a party that had given Americans overregulation, slow growth, and endless (if limited) war, led by an unpopular candidate, was defeated. After the 2020 election, however, something abnormal happened, at least for the United States: A defeated president refused to concede that he had lost the election and spent two months making false allegations, filing failed lawsuits, and pressuring state and local election officials, all culminating on January 6 in both public and private efforts to induce the vice president and/​or Congress to reject electoral votes and overturn the election. For more than two centuries the United States prided itself on demonstrating to the world the peaceful transfer of power after a vote of the people.

For that reason the most urgent task for our constitutional republic is to foreclose opportunities to interrupt the transfer of power, as Walter Olson outlines in the chapter titled “Election Law.” In particular, Congress should clarify and tighten the poorly crafted Electoral Count Act of 1887, which lays out rules for Congress’s handling of certified electoral votes following a presidential election. State legislators should pursue best practices for both ballot security and voter convenience and ideally adopt tabulation methods that yield a substantially complete result on Election Night, to avert confusion or misrepresentation about which candidate has won.

At the Cato Institute, we stand firmly on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — on the bedrock American values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Throughout our more than 40 years, we have been willing to criticize officials of both parties when they sought to take the country in another direction. But we have also been pleased to work with administrations and members of Congress of both parties when they seek to expand freedom, limit government, or protect the Constitution. Of course, our scholars will not hesitate to criticize unwise, imprudent, or dangerous initiatives from any source.

I am still fond of the Washington Post’s description of the first edition of the Handbook in 1995: “A soup‐​to‐​nuts agenda to reduce spending, kill programs, terminate whole agencies and dramatically restrict the power of the federal government.” I hope policymakers, policy analysts, and other concerned Americans will find valuable ideas in the ninth edition.

As I have been writing for years, the Food and Drug Administration should reclassify the opioid overdose antidote naloxone, approved for use in 1971 and used by non-physicians, including first responders, to rescue overdose victims for the past few decades, as an over-the-counter drug. The drug has been available OTC in Australia since 2015 and in Italy for more than 20 years.

Moreover, all 50 states have come up with ways to work around the prescription-only status of the drug—either by allowing state health directors and other licensed practitioners to issue standing orders to pharmacists to dispense the medication to requesting customers—or by authorizing pharmacists to prescribe the drug. There is thus ample evidence that non-physicians can and do safely and appropriately use naloxone. As annual overdose deaths exceed 100,000, I cannot overstate the value of making this drug widely and readily available.

The FDA has repeatedly encouraged naloxone manufacturers to request that the agency start reclassifying naloxone as an OTC drug. In 2019, then FDA-Commissioner Scott Gottlieb went so far as to have the agency design the Drug Facts Labels (DFL) required for drug makers to sell their products over the counter and even tested these labels for “consumer comprehension” in front of focus groups—a job usually required from manufacturers who request reclassifying their drugs as OTC. The Commissioner stated in the announcement that it is an unprecedented effort to facilitate and speed up the reclassification of naloxone from prescription-only to OTC.

So far…crickets.

Today the FDA issued a notice in the Federal Register that the agency’s “preliminary assessment” is that “certain naloxone products have the potential to be safe and effective for over-the-counter use.” An agency press release stated:

The Federal Register notice includes a preliminary assessment that certain naloxone drug products–up to 4 milligrams (mg) nasal spray and up to 2 mg autoinjector for intramuscular (IM) or subcutaneous (SC) use–may be approvable as safe and effective for nonprescription use. This preliminary assessment is intended to facilitate development and approval of nonprescription naloxone products; however, it is not a final determination that certain naloxone drug products are safe and effective for nonprescription use, and it does not mandate an immediately effective switch to nonprescription/over-the-counter (OTC) availability for naloxone.

As I have pointed out previously, the FDA doesn’t need to wait for the drug makers to request reclassifying a drug as OTC. Under FDA regulations, the FDA can undertake a reclassification review at the request of “any interested person” or the Commissioner himself. States may petition the FDA for reclassification. Finally, if all else fails, Congress can order the reclassification.

As Michael F. Cannon and I point out in our white paper, Drug Reformation:

Manufacturers often have little incentive to submit or support OTC petitions and every reason to oppose them, because removing prescription requirements for their or their competitors’ products brings greater price competition and reduced profits. The FDA’s policy of waiting for manufacturers to initiate prescription‐​to‐​OTC switches therefore rigs the process against consumers. If the power to require prescriptions remains with the FDA, the agency should initiate switches itself and abandon its historical practice of waiting for the manufacturers to petition the agency to switch their products.

The FDA’s Federal Register notice today is just another ill-fated attempt to prod naloxone manufacturers into asking the agency to start the OTC reclassification process. Congress should respond to FDA fecklessness by imposing a deadline for the agency to make naloxone OTC.

According to the United Nations, the world’s population reached 8 billion people today. Not everyone is excited by the news. As one source noted, “humans use as much ecological resources as if we lived on 1.75 Earths.”

In a recently released book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, we have analyzed prices of hundreds of food items, metals, minerals, finished goods, and fuels going back to 1850. We found that, contrary to expectations, resources became more abundant, not scarcer.

On average, every one percent increase in population corresponded to a one percent price decline relative to wages. That means that every one percent increase in population also corresponded to a five percent increase in personal resource abundance and a 16 percent increase in global resource abundance.

Personal resource abundance grew at a rate of 3.1 percent per year, thereby doubling every 22.6 years or so. Global resource abundance grew at a rate of 4.4 percent, thereby doubling every 16 years or so.

How is that possible?

Every new human being comes to the world not only with an empty stomach, but also a pair of hands, and, more importantly, a brain capable of intelligent thought and new knowledge creation.

In the process of economic development, human beings cause environmental damage, but the new wealth and knowledge that we create also allow us to become better stewards of the planet. That is why all environmental ranking tables are dominated by developed nations.

Doomsayers concerned about population growth are right to note that the world is constituted of a finite number of atoms – be they of copper or of zinc. But the finitude of atoms (i.e., resources) is largely irrelevant to human well-being. What matters is our ability to create new knowledge that combines and recombines those atoms in ever more valuable ways.

For example, a humble grain of sand had first given us glass jars, then windowpanes, and, most recently, fiber optic cables. So, new knowledge is not limited by the physical limits of our planet, but by the number of people who are free to think, speak, associate, invest and profit from their ideas and inventions.

For more, please visit www​.super​abun​dance​.com.

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Frank Sinatra crooned, “You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.” When it comes to CEO of the FTX crypto exchange and would-be policy impresario Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), it’s more like “You’re throwing twitter shade on Saturday, looking for a bailout next Tuesday.”

In crypto, karma moves fast. And in Washington, a crisis—such as a prominent brand in a buzzy industry losing billions—is thought to be a terrible thing to waste. Nonetheless, policymakers should not hastily patch perceived regulatory gaps in counterproductive ways, such as by scapegoating crypto technologies that mitigate by design some of the very risks plaguing FTX. Rather, the fate of FTX underscores the need for careful line drawing between what FTX is—a centralized crypto exchange, or a financial intermediary—and decentralized crypto exchanges that remove the need for such intermediaries.

As of this writing, the story of the rise, run on, and halting rescue of international crypto exchange FTX (not to be confused with a separate U.S. entity, FTX​.US) is still developing. According to SBF himself in a profanity-laden twitter mea culpa, even he is “still fleshing out every detail.”

But at a high level, here are some data points so far. In 2017, SBF founded trading firm Alameda Research. He made a mint of money arbitraging the difference in price of Bitcoin in the U.S. and that in Korea and Japan. In 2019, he founded FTX ostensibly to build a better mouse trap for crypto trading.

As a business, FTX offers leveraged and margined crypto trading, which present classic risk management considerations. FTX also issued its own crypto token, FTT, offering holders discounts on FTX trading fees. For his part, SBF is an active participant in the Washington crypto policy debate, including on proposals for crypto exchange regulation. Not everyone loves this.

On October 29^th, SBF tweeted a joke (since deleted) about Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”), the Chinese-Canadian CEO of rival crypto exchange Binance, not being allowed in Washington, DC. On November 2^nd, a report came out that SBF’s trading firm Alameda Research held significant amounts of FTX’s FTT token, leading to questions about the relationship between the two ventures. CZ’s Binance also held a lot of FTT, which it received after exiting a prior investment in FTX. On November 6^th, CZ tweeted that based on the recent revelations, Binance would liquidate its FTT. That day, CZ also tweeted, “[W]e won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.” (Incidentally, later in the song, Frank Sinatra also sang, “funny as it may seem, some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream.”)

Following CZ’s liquidation announcement, FTX customers began to increase asset withdrawals from the platform. As Matt Levine writes, “The reason for a run on FTX is if you think that FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange. If that’s the case, then a crash in the price of FTT will destabilize FTX. If you’re worried about that, you should take your money out of FTX before the crash.” People were worried about that.

By November 8^th, SBF was tweeting about a possible bailout from Binance. The next day, Binance walked away from that deal. Today, SBF tweeted that he “filed FTX, FTX US, and Alameda for voluntary Chapter 11 proceedings in the US.”

Unsurprisingly, this week’s events have led to calls for greater regulatory scrutiny of the already-under-scrutiny crypto ecosystem. For example, House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Rep. Maxine Waters (D–CA) called for “robust federal oversight and protections for consumers,” as the FTX news “highlights the urgent need for legislation.” In addition, Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Sen. Pat Toomey (R–PA) noted, “This episode underscores the need for a sensible regulatory regime.…”

Any plans to heed such calls must first distinguish centralized crypto exchanges like FTX from other players in the broader crypto ecosystem, specifically decentralized finance, or DeFi, projects. Notably, Senator Toomey’s comments were careful to specify that the issues at hand involve centralized exchanges. Whereas centralized exchanges are made up of human intermediaries that customers turn to based on trust, decentralized exchanges are made up of software programs known as smart contracts, which are written to self-execute when specific conditions are satisfied.

DeFi projects composed of open-source smart contracts stored on public blockchains are auditable by design, making DeFi transparent by default. Centralized exchanges, by contrast, are not inherently open. It’s essential that policymakers looking to regulate crypto recognize these differences before subjecting DeFi to poorly tailored rules that risk undermining consumer protection itself.

Claims of fraud and contractual breaches—wherever ripe—ought to be vigorously pursued. When it comes to generic financial losses, however, neither DeFi nor the public should be on the hook for a private centralized exchange’s mismanagement of risk. For policymakers who would consider subsidizing private risk taking, increasing moral hazard, Sinatra’s words ultimately may offer the greatest wisdom about a bad day at the races: “That’s life.”

From award-winning public school teacher to microschool founder, teacher, and consultant, Makenzie Oliver has had quite a journey.

Makenzie spent 7 years as a teacher in Missouri, where she was honored with a “Heartland’s Best Teacher” award in 2013. After her family moved to Florida, she taught 5 years and then became an instructional coach. She won another “teacher of the year” award in Florida. While she loved teaching, she often felt that her hands were tied. Over the years, she began to realize that education could look very different than what she was able to do in her classroom each day.

She considered homeschooling, but she didn’t want to do it alone. Having a little school in her backyard was a dream that seemed unrealistic. Then COVID hit, and Makenzie didn’t want to deal with the unknowns, stress, and mandates as a teacher. And she wanted to ensure her daughters had a great educational experience. She did some research and found out she could homeschool other children and give them a unique and personalized education without starting a private school.

Makenzie started Lighthouse Learning microschool in August 2020 in her home. She purposely keeps it small so she can customize each child’s education. “We don’t use a set curriculum,” she says. “For each child, we see where they are and create personalized learning plans for them.”

Students at Lighthouse Learning cover all the traditional academic subjects like reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and geography. But they do it in an engaging student-centered way that encourages exploration and love of learning. Lighthouse is a full-time, 5‑days a week school, but the days are structured to include outdoor learning, field trips, community service, and life skills like gardening and cooking. A part-time option is also available. 

From her time in public schools—both as a teacher and especially as an instructional coach—Makenzie knows other teachers experience the same stress, burnout, and sense that their hands are tied that she did. In addition to her microschool, Makenzie started Teacher, Let Your Light Shine to help other teachers (and parents) start their own microschools or homeschool businesses.

Teacher, Let Your Light Shine offers many levels of support to help potential microschool and homeschool business founders wherever they are in their journeys. She has a twice-a-week podcast where she offers personal stories, encouragement, and practical advice for education entrepreneurs. Makenzie also offers free downloadable resources with business-building tips and strategies.

For those who want more help as they consider their options, Makenzie offers different coaching packages. A one-hour “Clarity Coaching” call is designed to help teachers set achievable goals, understand their options, and get answers to their questions. They’ll come away with initial action steps towards building a microschool or homeschooling business.

Teachers who are ready to jump right in might be interested in the “Microschool Business Builder” package, which is a two-month program. It includes the clarity coaching session plus organizational help to map out their vision, a streamlined plan of action that includes researching legal issues and creating an LLC, and help determining tuition, budgets, and funding sources. There’s also a four-month version of the Microschool Business Builder package that offers higher levels of support.

The majority of Makenzie’s clients are teachers who know what they want to do educationally but need help with the business side of things. She worked with 10 women who started schools in 2022 and has another 20 who are planning to start schools next year. She also has a Facebook group with hundreds of teachers and parents who are somewhere on the education entrepreneurship journey.

Makenzie’s background in teaching, coaching, and starting her own school has positioned her to be able to help other teachers stay in the profession while charting their own course. “People look at Lighthouse Learning and get inspired,” Makenzie says. “I tell them they don’t have to adopt my model—they can create the school they want.”

Teachers and parents who want to start their own learning entities don’t need to go it alone or start completely from scratch. Many of the people who have traveled that path are available for guidance. If you’re considering starting a microschool or homeschool business, the resources at Teacher, Let Your Light Shine can help point you in the right direction.

How much went right with Tuesday’s midterm election? A lot. Violence at the polls, much feared, didn’t happen. Nor did widespread intimidation. For all the talk of voter suppression, poll access was healthy and uneventful in the state of Georgia and pretty much everywhere else. Nearly all candidates who’d expressed distrust in the electoral process did in fact concede in a timely way on losing their races. (On this last, Benjy Sarlin offers one plausible explanation, which is that Donald Trump simply is unlike most persons in his willingness to commit with total intensity to a storm of lies: it all helps underscore “just how much Stop The Steal was a one-man, top-down phenomenon in 2020.”)

Each Election Day also features news stories that get some play, but in fact fall within the normal range for things that happen this time of year. Here are four stories for which we did not need to set our hair on fire.

HUMANS SCREWED UP. Example: owing to human error a Georgia county failed to send out 1,000 or so absentee ballots. The error was discovered, the county moved to fix things, and the voters involved were given several options to adapt. It wasn’t a plot, and things are going to be okay.

MACHINES SCREWED UP. During every big election, equipment breaks down somewhere. This time there were ballot tabulation failures that caused delays, some serious, for voters at 70 of 223 voting centers in Maricopa County, Ariz. Happily, as in the Georgia case, modern voting methods build in backup options that included use of temporary dropboxes for ballots not being accepted by tabulators, as well as the availability of other voting centers with no wait. (Under the Arizona system, you needn’t vote at a neighborhood precinct but can go to whichever voting center you please.) Again: it wasn’t a plot, despite some efforts to portray it as such.

SOMEONE SUED SOMEONE. Every big election includes litigation. When it’s groundless litigation, as with an attempt to shut down Detroit mail votes, the courts’ job is to shut it down, and we (and the voters) may draw negative inferences about those who filed it. Other times the issue is closer, as with a battle in Pennsylvania in which the state’s high court split 3–3 over whether or not to count mail ballots that arrive in undated or misdated envelopes.

Most of the legally close claims tend to involve relatively few actual votes. Some coverage has portrayed the recent Pennsylvania dispute on envelope dating as resulting in the rejection of more than 2,000 ballots in Philadelphia, but according to a Washington Post account, that’s the number rejected *total*, and ballots get rejected for plenty of reasons other than envelope misdating. Moreover, mail ballots once rejected can often still be rescued (“cured”) rather than resulting in the annihilation of a vote.

THE FEDS SENT MONITORS. The U.S. Department of Justice said Monday it was sending election monitors to 24 states, and Florida Gov. DeSantis said those monitors wouldn’t be allowed inside polling places in his state. Here the hair-on-fire reactions divided into opposing scorch salons, the “OMG things have gotten so bad the feds have to step in” versus “OMG Merrick Garland commits new outrage against the Constitution.”

The actual story is less exciting. Federal use of monitors regarding Voting Rights Act compliance has been going on for 50 years, and the practice has tended to decay, rather than accelerate, in the past decade. The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County case much curtailed the feds’ discretion to place observers *inside* polling places in what were deemed suspect jurisdictions. DoJ remains free to send monitors for tasks that do not require polling place access, such as fielding complaints or interviewing locals, but that’s relatively ho-hum stuff. All sides seem to agree that aside from exceptional situations as when there is a court order, the feds have no right to hang out inside polling places unless state law allows them to. So the Florida showdown wasn’t much of a showdown.

I’ve written before about how the contending “voter suppression” and “voter integrity” schools on left and right encourage an alarmist picture of an electoral system in crisis, even though by and large the system we have tends to work pretty well. Things on Tuesday were mostly normal and boring, and in the world of election administration, normal and boring are good.

To obtain an immigrant visa—the precursor to a green card or legal permanent residence—applicants must travel for an in-person interview with a consular officer. This crucial step is routine in many countries. In others, applicants may have to travel a great distance to reach an alternate consulate. But in still others, the United States has no immigrant visa processing at all, requiring applicants to obtain authorization to travel to a third country for processing.

This lack of processing is not a result of COVID-19 closures, but simply a policy choice on the part of the U.S. Department of State.

• In 2022, the State Department is indefinitely offering no routine immigrant visa processing in 67 countries.
• About 720 million people reside in countries without routine immigrant visa processing.
• The main alternate processing locations for these countries were an average of 669 miles away.
• Over the last decade, the State Department has issued over 400,000 immigrant visas to people from these countries

It almost certainly would have issued many more if not for this significant hurdle. Table 1 lists the countries without an immigrant visa processing consulate. The list of countries are based on the list of nationalities that the United States recognizes for purposes of processing nonimmigrant (or temporary) visas.

Figure 1 shows the operating status of consulates in countries without routine immigrant visa processing.

• No consulate: In 24 countries—about 36 percent of those without immigrant visa processing—the country simply does not have a consulate or embassy. Though this doesn’t always mean that there are no U.S. consular affairs officials in those countries, the lack of a consulate means that there is no opportunity to apply for visas. The two largest countries in this group are North Korea and the State of Palestine where the United States has no diplomatic ties. The rest are small states and island nations, the largest of which is Comoros with nearly 900,000 residents.
• Closed consulates: In another 12 countries—18 percent of cases—the State Department has closed the consulates. These are permanent or indefinite closures, not related to COVID-19. This list continues to grow. The earliest such closure was in Iran in 1979, and although other western countries like the United Kingdom do process visas there, the United States has made no attempt to revisit this decision in over four decades. In 2019, the State Department closed its consulate in Venezuela to demonstrate political opposition to its government. Most recently, the United States shuttered embassies in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, even though there is no fighting occurring in the latter two nations. One solution to this problem would be for the United States should divorce visa issuing functions from whether it has diplomatic ties with that country.
• Nonimmigrant-Only: Another 28 countries (42 percent of cases) actually have a consulate, but it only processes nonimmigrant (or temporary) visas to the United States. It will not handle immigrant visas. In one way, this makes sense because nonimmigrant visas are much more common than immigrant visas. But it is also difficult to justify excluding such a small percentage of applicants when immigrants typically have much closer connections to the United States. The State Department should make immigrant visa services immediately available at these locations.
• Almost No Visas or No Visas: The final three embassies (4 percent) without routine immigrant visa processing offer no visas at all (Central African Republic) and very limited nonimmigrant visa processing (Timor-Leste and South Sudan).

Figure 2 shows the number of countries without routine immigrant visa processing by distance to the country’s alternate processing location. 19 percent are less than 200 miles from the alternate location, while a majority are more than 400 miles. About 38 percent are more than 600 miles, and 19 percent are more than 1,000 miles.

In many cases, the alternate locations aren’t even in route to the United States, creating much longer trips than the raw mileage would indicate. But as attorney Amien Kacou points out, the lack of visa processing in country is more than a matter of just distance. For example, not only do Iranians need to leave Iran for the visa interview, they also need to leave their home country for other elements of the immigrant visa process, such as medical screening, making distance even more costly.

Other complications can arise when it is difficult to enter the alternate locations. For instance, Yemenis are required to be processed in Egypt, but they need to obtain a visa to enter Egypt. Attorney Rafael Urena estimates that the lack of in-country processing can add tens of thousands of dollars for large Yemeni families. Palestinians also have difficulty getting visa processing in Jerusalem because of Israel’s entry restrictions. Here is a depressing story about an Iraqi family who obtained visas to go to Turkey for processing, but their Turkish visas expired before the State Department processed their U.S. visas.

[E]mbassy officials declined to schedule an immigration appointment until she arrived in Turkey.… It took months of false starts and trips to bureaucratic offices before she finally obtained a Turkish visa … In Ankara, the couple learned the next available appointment was three months away.… They felt like outcasts because they didn’t speak Turkish. Khalaf ran out of one medicine, then another. He imagined a stroke or seizure striking him in his sleep.… [T]he expiration of their Turkish visas are causing the couple to fear they could be deported any day — him to the U.S., her to Iraq.

One Afghan told Ben Schamisso that he spent his life savings to be able to get a permit to travel to Pakistan. Some applicants, however, simply cannot travel to another embassy. “The problem is there is no embassy in Afghanistan,” Army Capt. Jeff Trammell told NBC about why he has been unable to obtain an immigrant visa for his Afghan interpreter. Trammell said he was frustrated with the refusal to do remote interviews electronically.

The requirement to interview at a U.S. embassy or consulate is one of the requirements that rarely makes it into a summary of U.S. immigration law, but it is important, and it can be very challenging in some circumstances. The State Department should conduct virtual interviews and allow immigrant visa applicants to interview at consulates that are currently nonimmigrant-only. Immigrating to the United States can be made much easier without congressional action, and this administration shouldn’t miss its opportunity to deliver.

Moments after the original version of this post was published, the State Department announced that it would fully reopen immigrant visa processing in Cuba starting Jan. 2023. The post has been updated accordingly.