Tag: commentary

It’s 2026, and everyday life is quietly futuristic. Few of us carry cash, and in some cities you can get into an autonomous car that will take you through traffic safely enough to squeeze in a nap. Yet a doctor’s office can swap your first and last name on an intake form and trigger hours of administrative hell. 

That mismatch is a core insight behind the abundance movement. Abundance argues we should be able to deliver essentials – like housing, energy, and healthcare – faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. You should not spend hours on the phone to stop a clerical error from becoming a $1,000+ bill.

Housing makes headlines but the abundance agenda covers everything else we fail to deliver or lack, even when solutions are within sight.

Scarcity today does not entail empty shelves or rickets. Rather, it is manifest in unnecessary wait times, surcharges on bills, or infrequent tragedies we strangely accept. Our systems move too slowly or frequently break. 

Constraints are often created by bureaucratic and procedural friction. The US has world-class medicine, yet care is routinely delayed by paperwork. Too often, referrals still travel by fax. Authorizations bounce between offices and insurers. So staff time is overwhelmingly spent pushing forms instead of treating patients. Delays discourage patients from seeking essential care. 

Scarcity appears in other ways like preventable blindness, which affects hundreds of millions today. We have appropriate treatments; we lack screening devices that catch cases in time. Scarcity is also time spent and higher costs incurred by firms trying to replace fragile supply chains built on imported petrochemical inputs that are vulnerable to price shocks, policy swings, and geopolitical winds. 

Some bottlenecks are regulatory in nature. For instance, if we want abundant healthcare, we should lift indirect Congressional caps on the number of medical residents; increasing the supply of doctors will lower costs. If we want more robust supply chains, we should reduce uncertainty by choosing and sticking with a trade policy; ideally, we eliminate tariffs, which only increase costs. 

But policy isn’t responsible for all scarcity. No law will automate paperwork that delays care, identify substitutes for petrochemical inputs, or build tools to screen patients for preventable blindness. 

The good news is solutions to these non-policy bottlenecks already exist.

For instance, Medsender is building AI tools that replace fax-and-phone based referrals and prior authorizations. When paperwork moves faster, patients get routed to the right care sooner, and clinics can spend their time on medicine instead of bureaucracy. Visilant is scaling low-cost vision screening so treatable eye disease is caught early, before people lose sight. Materiom assists firms in finding and adopting sustainable alternatives to petrochemical materials, reducing cost and friction when supply chains shift.

These examples show we’re not short on solutions. The fact that your doctor still uses a fax machine instead of Medsender illustrates the problem: the solutions have yet to scale. But scaling requires the right kind of capital. 

This is where abundance-aligned funders and investors come in. They can help turn promising tech tools into widely adopted solutions that end unnecessary scarcity. 

Mission-driven venture firms like Khosla Ventures have shown what it looks like to do so: their investment portfolio includes companies that seek to eliminate common physical pain, develop lab grown organs for drug discovery, and convert pollution into energy. 

On the non-profit side, Fast Forward backs tech firms designed to scale — including Visilant and Materiom, who were members of its 2025 Startup Accelerator program.

But Khosla Ventures and Fast Forward are outliers. Most capital still behaves as if abundance is either a policy fight or a buzzword. To end an era of scarcity, we need investors and funders to rethink their business models. 

If lawmakers want to make pharmaceuticals more affordable, they should look past populist policies like price controls that will only make matters worse and set their sights on reforming the Pharmacy Benefit Manager market.

PBMs manage the drug benefits for insurers and negotiate discounts with drug manufacturers. You probably use one every time you go to the pharmacy to get your medications refilled and don’t even realize it. The top three PBMs, which process about 80% of all prescription claims, are health conglomerates that include major insurance companies.

PBMs argue that their negotiations lower drug costs, which logically makes sense but fails to account for an essential question: whose costs? When it comes to the drug market, this distinction is everything.

When PBMs negotiate discounts with manufacturers, they consider the resulting net prices to be proprietary information and keep consumers in the dark. Consequently, the actual prices paid for medicines are not widely known. Since the actual transaction prices are unknown, discounts that would benefit patients in a properly functioning market are actually raising patients’ out-of-pocket spending.

Such a bizarre outcome occurs because patients’ costs are tied to the only visible price – the drugs’ list prices. But these prices exclude the negotiated discounts. As a result, a patient whose health insurance requires a 20% co-insurance payment will spend $20 for a drug with a list price of $100. However, the actual drug cost is not $100. On average, total rebates and discounts for a drug are around 50% of the list price. So, the total cost of the drug is really $50, not $100.

Consequently, patients are paying a 40% co-insurance rate on a drug’s net costs ($50) rather than the expected 20% rate. Insurers benefit by only needing to pay $30. Several adverse outcomes result.

This system inequitably shifts some of the costs that should be covered by insurers to patients that require expensive medicines. As shown above, patients end up paying twice as much as they should.

Even worse, the dollar costs shifted to patients have been growing. Since 2018, list prices for brand-name drugs have grown, but the negotiated discounts have grown even faster.

These trends mean that the costs covered by insurers have been consistently declining. Meanwhile patients’ out-of-pocket costs, which are based on list prices, are growing.

PBMs respond by claiming that they are faithfully serving their role by passing all the negotiated discounts to insurers. While that’s true, it is irrelevant to consumers because the PBM and the insurer are now part of the same conglomerate.

The insurer’s justification – that they use the discounts to lower premiums for everyone – also falls flat. While also true, it means that insurers are subsidizing the costs for all beneficiaries by increasing the costs for patients who require expensive medicines. This is exactly the opposite of how insurance is supposed to work.

These problems alone warrant reforms to how PBMs operate, but PBM operations impose even more troubling outcomes. For instance, PBMs will often receive payments from payers (especially Medicaid and Medicare) that exceed their payments to pharmacies. This practice, known as spread pricing, unnecessarily inflates costs.

The U.S. government shutdown has finally come to an end after 43 days that resulted in thousands of flights being cancelled or delayed, food aid benefits for millions of Americans being jeopardized and hundreds of thousands of federal workers being furloughed. 

But the question is: Which party bears responsibility for this shutdown? Let’s look at the facts as to who bears responsibility, not the misleading rhetoric.

First, the shutdown’s genesis resulted from the Congress’ inability to timely pass the required 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government for the next fiscal year that began on October 1.  Neither party has been timely in passing a budget: 1997 was the last time that Congress passed a budget on time.

Accordingly, on September 19, the House Republicans passed a continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government at current levels until November 21 to allow more time for budget negotiations.

Senate Democrats, however, refused to support a bill that would have allowed the government to remain open during negotiations, instead conditioning their vote to keep the government open only if the “temporary” additional tax credits for Obamacare that had been enacted during the COVID pandemic were extended. 

According to the Cato Institute, these “subsidies cover health insurance premiums for the roughly 7% of Americans who use the government-run Obamacare insurance marketplace.”  The Cato Institute estimates that approximately one-third of these enhanced subsidies went to people with incomes above 400% of the poverty level, or above $62,600 for a single person. 

In short, in return for keeping the government open during budget negotiations, Senate Democrats insisted that Republicans first capitulate on an item that was part of those budget negotiations.  

Moreover, extending these “temporary” subsidies for Obamacare was a significant budget item over which to condition keeping the government open. The Congressional Budget Office has recently estimated that permanently extending these enhanced COVID-19 subsidies for Obamacare would increase the U.S. budget deficit by $350 billion over the next 10 years. 

According to the Economic Innovation Center, this additional cost is more than Congress would spend on either the FBI, the national parks service, NASA or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the next 10 years.

More critically, even without the cost of these enhanced subsidies, the U.S. is already on track to run a deficit of $1.8 trillion this year and a public debt of 124% of its entire Gross National Product — which is higher than the debt immediately after World War II. 

Millennials and Generation Z should understand that they will end up paying for this financial irresponsibility via future taxes, so they need to think carefully about supporting the extension of “temporary” subsidies for insurance policy enhancements that they do not need. More on that in a moment.

In short, Senate Democrats’ insistence on continuing what were intended as temporary subsidies during a pandemic as a condition for reopening the government after the pandemic had ended is pure extortion, that is, it seeks to obtain an objective “by coercive means.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune even offered Senate Democrats a vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies as part of a deal to end the shutdown, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected as insufficient. 

However, on November 9, eight Senate Democrats ultimately agreed to end the filibuster in return for a vote on the tax credits in December. This deal has nonetheless been criticized by those who insisted on their way (enact the tax credits now) or the highway (a continued shutdown).  Among those who took the “my way or the highway” approach were House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Representative Ro Khanna and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the deal to end the pain from the shutdown “pathetic.”

However, there is a more responsible route to address the rising cost of Obamacare premiums than extending temporary tax credits enacted because of the pandemic: Agree to the formation of a bipartisan commission of respected elder statesmen to propose measures to reduce the costs of Obamacare, which would be subject to an up-or-down vote. 

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments to scrutinize the tariffs President Trump’s sweeping levied against every nation on earth. Trump invoked emergency powers from an obscure law to justify this move. Those now petitioning the Supreme Court to declare the tariffs unconstitutional have argued that whatever that obscure law says, Congress cannot delegate its exclusive powers — including the power to tax and to regulate foreign commerce — to the president. If that law delegates these powers, it is unconstitutional.

The petitioners have a point: Trump claims that his tariffs are not unconstitutional, because his unique discretion over foreign policy means Congress has not delegated away its powers. But in its attempt to sanction unprecedented authoritarian powers over domestic affairs, this argument distorts the meaning of the president’s actual foreign policy power. The president’s discretion over trade applies only in wartime against specific belligerents — not in perpetuity or even against our allies.

Trump’s argument’s kernel of truth is that the Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and chief negotiator of treaties. He does need discretion to repel imminent threats of force by foreign powers and to make alliances against them. In genuine crisis situations, he cannot wait for Congress to debate if he’s to defend the lives, liberties, and property of American citizens.

The law Trump cites to justify his tariff power, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), in fact bears the mark of this constitutional legacy. As a useful amicus brief (by Aditya Bamzai of the UVA  School of Law) in the current tariffs case indicates, the law is heir to the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, passed in World War I to allow the president to cut off all trade with an enemy nation in the event of a declared war against it. Obviously, to conduct a war, the commander in chief needs to be able to embargo trade that supplies material support to the enemy.

At first blush it might seem that if the law empowers the president to cut off all trade, it should allow him to regulate trade through tariffs. Jill Homan of the America First Policy Institute makes just the argument in another amicus brief in support of the president. But it is a slipshod argument. The IEEPA arises from the need to allow the president to impose powerful embargoes against specific military belligerents during declared wars. That is a more powerful use of force, but against a specific, threatening target. Trump’s tariffs, by contrast, have been imposed indefinitely against the whole world — including closely allied peaceful nations such as the UK, Canada, and France — in response to a merely “economic” threat.

The idea of a tariff on commerce with an enemy in wartime makes little sense. If an “enemy” can safely be traded with as long as he pays an extra bribe, he must not be very threatening. A truly threatening enemy, such as Germany or Japan during World War II, is one you’d embargo entirely to cut off fuel for their war effort.

Professor Bamzai points out that most of history leading up to the Trading with the Enemy Act involves total embargoes. The few exceptions are revealing. A fee was imposed on trade in cotton with Tennessee during the U.S. Civil War, but only when Tennessee had been militarily occupied and hostilities were ceasing. He also notes that fees were imposed on trade with Mexican ports during the Mexican-American War. But as another amicus brief against the tariffs points out, they were only against Mexican nationals ­— not U.S. citizens who pay tariffs ­— and only in ports that were occupied by the American military.

Whatever the trade restrictions in wars that were part of the president’s genuine foreign policy power, they applied only to trade with belligerent or occupied nations and only for the duration of the war. Contrast that with Trump’s tariffs: in the name of “foreign policy,” President Trump is, in effect, declaring economic “war” against the entire world, enemies and allies alike. But a real American foreign policy does recognize allies, like the United Kingdom and Canada.

The idea that the president is due some deference to manage his sweeping global tariffs in the name of “foreign policy” is a complete sham.

Voter intimidation, unfortunately, is nothing new. I saw it 37 years ago, on Election Day in 1988, when I was an Assistant U.S. Attorney on duty at a local polling place. A person dressed as a police officer, carrying a large sign that said “Non-Citizens May Not Vote,” was questioning a Latino couple and asking for proof of citizenshipas they approached the polling station. I called the FBI, and it turns out this bad actor wasn’t acting alone – he was part of an orchestrated effort to intimidate Latino voters at 20 polling locations across Santa Ana.

The candidate who was the beneficiary of this racist and illegal effort went on to narrowly win the election, and that moment ultimately shaped my career and my commitment to protecting every American’s fundamental right to participate in our democracy.

Today, we are facing a similar and no less serious threat. The Trump administration’s ICE raids have had a devastating impact on thousands of people here in Orange County and across California. Images of masked ICE agents arresting or harassing community members simply because of their language, skin color or occupation as they go about their daily lives – including U.S. citizens and legal residents – has created a real and understandable fear among too many of our families, friends, neighbors and communities. This intimidation campaign has deterred kids from going to school, kept families from attending church, and stopped workers from doing their essential jobs.

Adding to this heightened state of fear, President Trump now plans to send federal poll watchers to California to “monitor” the election. Given his record of trying to overturn legitimate elections and spreading false accusations about undocumented Latinos voting, his intentions are clear: to control and suppress the vote. Combined with Republicans’ reckless and debunked rhetoric about widespread voter fraud, these actions are a thinly veiled attempt to justify the sort of voter intimidation that you see in authoritarian regimes around the world.

As we approach our next Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 4, we cannot allow these intimidation tactics to prevent Californians from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

A recent article from the Daily News underscores this exact fear, particularly among Latino and immigrant populations, about the safety of showing up at the polls amid ICE’s ongoing raids. In fact, two out of three U.S.-born, registered Latino voters in a recent California survey said they were concerned about encountering immigration enforcement agents at a polling location in next week’s election.

To be clear: Legal U.S. citizens fear that simply going to a polling place could put them at risk of physical harm or unlawful detention.

Thankfully, in California, we have a safeguard.

Brightline West, the private high-speed rail line planned for the I-15 median, is facing financial challenges which may prevent it from being completed. These developments raise an obvious question: why is a Southern California government agency spending taxpayer money planning a high-speed rail service to connect with a train that may never be built?

The High-Desert Corridor is a 54-mile high-speed rail line intended to connect Palmdale with Victorville at a cost last estimated to be between $5.8 and $6.6 billion, but likely to be a multiple of that. Connecting car-oriented cities with respective populations of 167,000 and 141,000 only makes sense if the service also connects to other intercity rail lines.

At Palmdale, the High-Desert Corridor is supposed to connect with the state-run California High-Speed Rail project, which has been a dubious proposition for quite some time. Even with a new infusion of $15 billion of cap-and-trade funds, the California High-Speed Rail Authority barely has enough money to connect Bakersfield to Merced. If the Authority is able to complete that segment, its next objective appears to be Gilroy in Northern California with an aspirational service date in 2038. Only after that might we expect work to begin on an extension from Bakersfield south to Palmdale.

By contrast, the Victorville connection to Brightline West seemed like more of a sure thing—until recently. In March, Brightline West raised $2.5 billion on the municipal bond market.  With previous bond proceeds and a Biden-era federal grant, the railroad had raised about half of its $12.4 billion estimated construction cost, putting Brightline in a strong financial position to meet its projected December 2028 start date.

But today, Brightline West’s prospects are much more doubtful. Management disclosed a new, much higher cost estimate of $21.5 billion when it applied to the Trump Administration for a federal loan. It also added nine months to its project timeline.

Other developments have cast doubt as to whether Brightline West can raise more money from banks or bond investors. Its Florida-based counterpart missed interest payments and was compelled to offer a 15% yield on new bonds, after it failed to meet ridership and revenue projections.

The $2.5 billion of Brightline West municipal bond suffered a steep decline in value, plunging to about 85 cents on the dollar in mid-July before rebounding into the low 90s by late August. More recently, with the disclosure of the higher construction cost and delayed completion date, the bonds fell further, trading at 75 cents on October 9. At this price, the Brightline West bonds are yielding 12.7% to maturity reflecting grave (and very understandable) investor doubts about the prospects of repayment.

Recently, Governor Gavin Newsom granted a small respite to California’s relentless attack on the state’s natural resources. Newsom signed the “California Energy Affordability and Security Act,” which allows Kern County to approve 2,000 oil and gas drilling permits a year without going through California’s arduous environmental review process.

This is a positive development, but it comes in the face of substantial state-erected obstacles to extracting California’s vast natural resources. If California is truly serious about unlocking this source of energy, it must take further steps to eliminate the barriers it has placed on its oil and gas industry.

For example, despite the new law, state policy still stands in the way of Kern County’s drive to permit more wells. That’s because a 2022 state law prohibits the drilling of new oil wells within 3,200 feet of a “health protection zone.” While that term sounds reasonable, it turns out that a “health protection zone” basically includes any place where people may exist. And even if a well originally operates outside of a protected area, any new development within six-tenths of a mile subjects the well to a host of regulations that make it between difficult and impossible to operate.

If California sincerely wanted to address energy affordability, it would make it simpler for property owners to harvest the state’s mineral wealth. Energy abundance is necessary to bring down costs. But who in their right mind would start drilling in California when the future presence of humanity within 3,200 feet at any point in the future threatens to shut the well down? California is a big state, but it is not so big that one can be sure to operate away from all development indefinitely. So long as the 3,200-foot setback law exists, Californians will be unable to produce the energy supply necessary to lower costs.

The policy is not only destructive. In many cases, it’s unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from taking private property without compensating the owner. And while the typical taking involves the government condemning property through eminent domain, the Supreme Court has long understood that some restrictions on the lawful use of property can be so severe as to become a taking.

Indeed, the first significant Supreme Court case recognizing this principle involved a statute prohibiting the mining of a certain type of coal. The Supreme Court in Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon held that “[t]o make it commercially impracticable to mine certain coal has very nearly the same effect for constitutional purposes as appropriating or destroying it.”

Owners of mineral estates in California today are in a similar position. Although state law has long recognized the existence of a separate mineral estate, California law now makes it impossible for owners to extract the valuable resources below the surface.

President Trump has kept lots of constitutional rights activists like me quite busy since his return to the Oval Office. His misuse of federal agents and multiple state National Guard personnel from Red states in Blue cities for pretextual immigration enforcement actions that double as political repression operations has been a particular focus of mine.

But you don’t have to be America’s chief executive in order to have the power to try to violate a citizen’s rights. You can be a career bureaucrat and do it behind a veil of secrecy, believing that your actions will never see the light of day.

Fortunately, and at least occasionally, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and its companion statute, the Privacy Act (PA), can help reveal the dubious or even unlawful actions of those in the Executive branch.

Whereas FOIA is used to get federal records about policies, procedures, organizational structure, and the like released, the PA allows you to ask any federal agency or department for records that mention you by name. This is a story involving how a PA lawsuit exposed extremely questionable conduct by one career bureaucrat at the National Security Agency (NSA). First, some background.

On March, 2, 2017, yours truly authored a piece for the online journal JustSecurity.org, an outlet that focuses on issues at the nexus of national security and the law. That piece went into some detail about pre-9/11 managerial incompetence that contributed to Al Qaeda’s successful attacks on September 11, and the subsequent retaliation against NSA whistleblowers who attempted to expose the truth about how America’s most lethal intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor could’ve been prevented. 

What I didn’t learn until just last month was that one NSA official, Patrick Bomgardner, was so outraged by my story – which contained no classified information – that he acted with the apparent intent of getting me prosecuted for my First Amendment protected speech.

And I only learned about Bomgardner’s action thanks to PA litigation I filed against my former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The latest batch of documents released by the CIA in my PA suit in August 2025 revealed that almost three weeks after my JustSecurity piece ran, CIA officials forwarded the piece to Bomgardner at NSA. They did so because what I wrote –even though CIA officials had found no classified information in my story.

Bomgardner’s reply was telling.

“This is no longer a prepublication review. I’m forwarding to our Unauthorized Media Disclosures Working Group for action.

“UMDWG, Please see CIA’s request below regarding the article attached.

“Cheers

“Pat”

Everything I referenced in my JustSecurity piece was unclassified and publicly available, a fact CIA had already established and something Bomgardner could’ve confirmed himself by simply following the links in the piece. Instead, he reflexively engaged in an authoritarian response to my exercise of my constitutional rights, without any pressure or prompting from anyone in his chain of command.

I have a follow up FOIA with NSA asking for records relevant to Bomgardner’s pernicious referral to try to get me prosecuted to see just how far the process actually went. Even so, what Bomgardner did over eight years ago seems rather quaint in our current circumstances.

I want you to imagine federal law enforcement and intelligence services filled at the top and quite a way down into the bureaucracy with people who have that same kind of authoritarian impulse and worldview. Next, imagine that those same authoritarian-minded people were recruited by and answer to a president who daily calls for investigations, fines, firings, lawsuits, or worse against any American individual or organization that opposes his policies.

That is Donald Trump’s federal government in 2025, as the people of Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston and other cities can attest. And in the wake of the assassination of right-wing political pugilist Charlie Kirk last week and the regime’s reaction to it, it’s a near certainty that Trump’s campaign of political retribution and repression will intensify.

There is still a way to stop such repression. Senate Democrats could refuse to allow any government funding bill to get a vote.

The federal government runs out of money at midnight on September 30. Senate rules require 60 affirmative votes on a procedural motion to end debate on the underlying bill in order to proceed to a vote on the funding bill itself. If at least 41 Senate Democrats refuse to vote to end debate on a bill to fund the government after September 30, the flow of money to Trump’s political repression machine stops as of October 1.

While it’s true that Trump could declare federal law enforcement personnel “essential workers” and order them to stay on the job conducting ICE raids and politicized investigations of Trump’s “enemies,” but their landlords, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and gas stations aren’t going to take IOUs because only Congress can appropriate funds, not Trump.

At this point, the choice for Senate Democrats is rather clear: stop funding Trump’s repression machine and have a chance to save the Republic or keep funding it and watch him go after every group and every person who dares to oppose his unconstitutional actions. Both are lousy choices, but one is clearly worse than the other. Such is America in 2025.

Former CIA analyst and ex-House senior policy advisor Patrick G. Eddington is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley Through Eisenhower (GU Press, 2025).