Cagle World

The political and scientific fight over the COVID vaccines rages on, years later, with the belated acknowledgment by the FDA there were likely a small number of children killed by the vaccine, despite earlier denials.

Vaccine supporters are as unmoved by this as skeptics were of the FDA during the last administration. About 15% of U.S. adults got this year’s booster, according to the latest CDC survey. That might not be a failed product, but it certainly is a niche product. But what happened to the other part of Operation Warp Speed? We don’t hear much about monoclonal antibodies for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases anymore, even though they were extremely successful during the pandemic.

While vaccines stimulate the body to produce an immune response, monoclonal antibodies skip a few steps and infuse antibodies directly. Those antibodies attack pathogens just as the body’s own immune response would. Trials and real-world experience found them highly effective at reducing hospitalization and death during COVID, and most of us know somebody who received antibody treatment and felt better almost immediately. Most famously, President Trump rebounded sharply after receiving a Regeneron antibody infusion.

Monoclonal antibodies are also widely used for various cancers, which is the primary indication for most of the recently approved drugs of this type. There have been a pair of monoclonal antibodies for RSV prevention and one for Ebola treatment approved in recent years. But that’s it for infectious diseases, which is somewhat surprising given the resurgence of measles and other infections that have been dominating headlines.

One of the sad things we learned during COVID is there are some figures in the public health establishment that would prefer effective treatments not be available to people who decline a vaccine. They seem to view disease as an appropriate punishment for declining a vaccine.

That same mentality may explain why we are not seeing more sustained interest in monoclonal antibodies for the full range of infectious diseases. That’s unfortunate, because one of the key lessons from COVID should be that we need a full arsenal of both immunoprophylaxis and treatment. Monoclonal antibodies could effectively serve as both a substitute for vaccines among people who decline vaccines of for whom vaccines are ineffective, as well as treatments for everyone, regardless of vaccination status.

If the regulatory system were designed to support the technology, monoclonal antibodies could be rapidly adapted to and deployed against emerging variants or entirely new pathogens, unlike vaccines that often lag months behind. Yet the infrastructure and enthusiasm that drove Warp Speed’s monoclonal successes have largely evaporated. Funding has dried up, emergency use authorizations for most early COVID monoclonals were revoked as variants shifted, and no comparable push has materialized for measles, flu, or any other resurgent pathogens. The result is a gaping hole in our pandemic preparedness.

We fight over vaccines while neglecting the monoclonals that we should all be able to agree on. This imbalance is not inevitable. It reflects policy choices. If the lessons of the COVID experience were carried forward toward a broader infectious-disease portfolio, we could have quickly modifiable monoclonal antibody therapies ready for the next outbreak, whatever it is.

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Copyright 2026 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

It isn’t often that two senators as far apart ideologically as Republican Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Democrat Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland get together on a piece of legislation. The bill they wrote together – the Main Street Depositor Protection Act – deserves a closer look.

The bill would raise the FDIC insurance limit on noninterest-bearing transaction accounts from $250,000 per account to $10 million, while raising contributions over a 10-year transition period.

Deposit guarantees are nice for people and companies with huge account balances, but they come at a cost – the contributions, a de facto tax, that banks are charged to fund the FDIC insurance pool. That cost is a socialization of risk that penalizes small depositors to prevent large depositors from bearing the burden of due diligence to make sure the banks they do business with are financially sound.

Community banks originally opposed the bill because of the burden of paying higher contributions, so they were carved out with a 10-year exemption. But those smaller banks still stand to lose when the exemption ends. And, sooner or later, customers of all banks, 99% of whom will never exceed the $250,000 limit, face higher fees, lost interest, and reduced account features due to increased contributions.

The 10-year exemption also has the obvious problem that the burden on community banks will be no more tolerable 10 years from now than it is today. As Norbert Michel of Cato points out, the Independent Community Bankers of America made a similar deal with Barney Frank to support Dodd-Frank, a deal they now surely regret as they have been bombarded by expensive rules and regulations from that agency.

Haggerty’s best argument is that the big money center banks have an implicit government deposit guarantee that would be counterbalanced by expanding the FDIC’s explicit guarantee to smaller banks. But the solution to moral hazard is not more moral hazard but less.

Congress should focus on financial reforms that scale back government guarantees and allow market institutions to fail if they take undue risks. A $10 million FDIC limit does the opposite; it means more institutions potentially taking undue risks with the consequences absorbed by taxpayers.

The simple reality is very few bank accounts exceed the current $250,000 limit, and there are a wide variety of market products that syndicate deposits and use other techniques to make the effective limit as much as $1 million or more already. This is a solution in search of a problem with potentially serious adverse consequences.

Those consequences go beyond the cost of higher contributions.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren supports raising the FDIC limit as part of an effort to exert more political control of the financial system. “You bet I’d tie them together,” she told Bloomberg when asked if tighter regulation would come along with higher FDIC limits.

Stronger federal guarantees over time mean more political power and therefore more political influence. And, ironically, banks having to worry about the reactions of their political masters to their decisions introduce a non-economic factor that makes financial crises more likely.

Smaller banks can and do compete on the basis of technology, convenience, service, and value. Higher FDIC limits would cause more harm than good.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

The health insurance industry always seems to win in Washington health care debates.

The most famous example was Obamacare, which transformed from a liberal crusade against insurance companies into a law guaranteeing them new profits, mandating Americans to buy their products, protecting them from competition, and providing hefty subsidies to shift skyrocketing costs onto taxpayers.

More recently, insurers dominated the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Through the law, they protected the exemption their pharmacy benefit manager subsidiaries use to pocket huge rebates on prescription drugs and extended supersized Obamacare subsidies that flow directly to them. Now, insurance companies have convinced Democrats to shut down the federal government to demand yet another extension of those subsidies, which were supposed to be a temporary COVID-era measure.

If they succeed again, it will probably be because the biggest health insurance company in the country has turned the largest political advocacy group into something close to a wholly owned subsidiary.

I’ve written many times about AARP’s lucrative arrangement with UnitedHealth, in which the latter’s cash cow AARP-branded Medicare plans divert about 5% of premiums to pay “royalties” to AARP. We estimated these payments totaled around $800 million per year, around triple what AARP collects in membership dues. That already made AARP the $800 million gorilla in D.C. health care debates, overwhelmingly supporting Democrats and outcomes favorable to the insurance industry.

Now we have to call them the “$9 Billion Gorilla.” That’s billion with a “b,” or nine thousand million. That’s how much UnitedHealth paid AARP in a one-time payment in 2024. Chris Jacobs of Juniper Research, who closely monitors AARP’s finances, believes the $9 billion payment is an advance on their premium skim, which has been raised again to 5.95% of premiums.

This news comes as seniors in AARP/UnitedHealth plans stare at hefty premium increases. Last year, AARP received 31 times as much money from UnitedHealth as it did from its members. This explains why all of their advocacy work appears to advance insurance industry priorities, even if it means higher prices for seniors.

Even before the incomprehensible $9 billion juicer, the kind of money AARP was collecting in its premium skim was enough to create a political juggernaut, and AARP spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and events that stop just short of urging a vote for a particular candidate but almost always favor elected Democrats and the party’s policy priorities.

Around the Inflation Reduction Act debate, AARP held 94 events for members of Congress with just one favoring a Republican – Senator Mike Crapo, who was cruising to an easy re-election – and the list of Democrats looks curiously like the party campaign committee’s list of vulnerable members.

Somehow, AARP operates this business model while maintaining its non-profit status.

Obviously, Republicans who get crosswise with such a lavishly funded juggernaut face political danger. But ducking and hiding won’t make the $9 billion go away. It’s better to shine a spotlight on the corrupt arrangement, and there is political upside there.

A couple years ago, my organization, American Commitment, commissioned a poll of voters age 55 and older that found 89% are concerned AARP is paid billions in corporate royalties from health insurance corporations like UnitedHealth while lobbying legislators and government officials on related issues.

Health care costs are spiraling out of control. We need real solutions that bring more choice and competition, less heavy-handed regulation, and less government spending flowing to the big insurance companies to paper over the problem. That requires exposing AARP for what it is: a de facto subsidiary of UnitedHealth.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

Medicare Advantage, once a highly innovative and successful health care option providing unique benefit designs for older Americans, is becoming increasingly costly and unstable – and will now be under the microscope in a criminal investigation of one of its biggest players, UnitedHealth. In brief, the exploitation of Medicare Advantage by a handful of massive corporate health services conglomerates threatens to destroy the program.

This is uniquely frustrating because the program is a critically needed alternative to traditional Medicare. Washington discourse has become dangerously polarized between advocates who want to abolish Medicare Advantage on one side and advocates who deny the existence of its many problems on the other. We need a middle path.

If ever there were a government program in need of DOGE-like accountability, competition, and transparency, Medicare Advantage is it.

In its 2024 report, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), the independent congressional agency established to advise the federal government on Medicare, found that “Medicare spends an estimated 22 percent more for Medicare Advantage enrollees than it would spend if those beneficiaries were enrolled in [fee-for-service] Medicare, a difference that translates into a projected $83 billion in 2024.”

Many have concluded that this excessive spending is largely due to big insurer-orchestrated fraudulent billing practices, patient coding abuses, and overcharges.

Under Medicare Advantage, insurers often upcode, deny or delay care through prior authorization requests and engage in other cost-increasing behaviors. These types of actions create barriers to care, reduce plan options, and decrease medication affordability. This misuse of the Medicare Advantage system not only hurts patients, but it’s financially inefficient for the government because patients remain sick for longer, leaving them continuously reliant on taxpayer-funded health care.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that some of the sickest patients who needed expensive treatments like nursing-home care dropped out of Medicare Advantage to switch to traditional Medicare at high rates. This suggests Medicare Advantage plans have been denying necessary coverage, leaving patients without the care they deserve and taxpayers footing the bill. This is unacceptable treatment of America’s elderly and an unfair burden on taxpayers and it demands accountability and transparency.

On top of these opaque practices leading to worse outcomes for patients and taxpayers is insurer-led consolidation in the healthcare system. Insurer conglomerates like UnitedHealth have gobbled up hospitals, physicians, pharmacies, and more, giving them unprecedented control over the health care system, including Medicare Advantage.

Medicare Advantage is a vital program but is unsustainable without proactive reforms to rein in overpayments while boosting transparency, competition, and choice.

Lasting reform means attacking the root of insurers’ bad actions with clearer disclosure rules, longer notification periods before insurers or providers drop plans, and simplified plan comparison tools to prevent seniors from unknowingly enrolling in plans that don’t meet their needs. Streamlining prior authorizations and their appeals process can give patients more timely access to the care they need and prevent insurers from denying care due to their own financial incentives.

Medicare Advantage’s promise is based on its ability to harness competition among plans to provide better coverage and care to seniors. But Congress has allowed a small cabal of mega-insurers to exploit this program, making it increasingly vulnerable to political attacks.

Unfortunately, the insurance companies have enormous political influence and fiercely resist reforms. This is the industry that successfully hijacked health care debates in both Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, both of which diverted hundreds of billions of dollars away from Medicare to unrelated spending. And UnitedHealth’s $10 billion in royalties paid to AARP have given the industry a direct influence over line of communication to millions of seniors and significant influence with policymakers.

Medicare Advantage can and should be a viable option for older Americans, but to save it, President Trump and Congress must take on the big insurers and reform it. And quickly.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

Elon Musk is probably the second-most powerful man in the world these days, so when he responded to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “delete all IP law” post with “I agree,” we need to take this radical proposal seriously.

Musk and Dorsey want their AI bots to remix all the world’s content without having to worry about who owns it, but it’s important that we slow down and start from first principles, or we risk undermining one of the foundations of our Constitution and economic system.

The moral case for IP was already powerfully articulated prior to American independence by John Locke. In his 1694 memorandum opposing the renewal of the Licensing Act, Locke wrote: “Books seem to me to be the most proper thing for a man to have a property in of any thing that is the product of his mind,” which is no doubt equally true of more modern creative works. Unlike physical property which is a mixture of an individual’s work effort and the pre-existing natural world, creative works are the pure creation of the human mind. How could they not then properly be owned by their authors?

The Constitution cements this truth. Article I, Section 8 empowers Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This clause isn’t incidental; it’s a deliberate choice to recognize inventors and authors properly have a property right in their creations and is the only right expressly protected in the base text of the Constitution, before the Bill of Rights was added.

In Federalist No. 43, James Madison said “the utility of this power will scarcely be questioned.” He continued: “The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals.”

Denying creators ownership over their ideas violates their natural rights, handing their work to those who contribute nothing. If we deleted all IP law, this fundamental principle would fall by the wayside, and anybody’s work could be copied by anyone – resulting in less creation, costly trade secret measures, and a thicket of contract law to mimic IP protections, bogging down courts and businesses even more than our current system.

The economic consequences of deleting all IP law would be severe.

In 2019, IP-intensive industries drove 41% of U.S. GDP and supported 62.5 million jobs – 44% of total employment – with better wages and benefits than non-IP sectors.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office received 669,000 patent applications in 2022, 35% from small and medium-sized enterprises, proving IP empowers entrepreneurs.

In AI, the U.S. led with 67,773 patent applications in 2024 and ranks first globally in AI innovation, per Stanford’s AI Index.

Our third-place ranking in the 2024 Global Innovation Index, with leadership in citable documents, software spending, and intangible asset intensity, underscores this strength.

Without IP, these achievements falter. Why would a startup invest in R&D if competitors could steal their breakthroughs? Why would a writer or artist create if their work could be copied without compensation? New medicines can cost billions to develop and bring to market, but who would develop them without IP?

Musk’s frustration no doubt is related to the real problems of our IP system, like patent trolls and excessive litigation along with a lack of clarity on the implications of using copyrighted works as AI training materials. But the solution isn’t to dismantle protections; it’s to adopt key reforms like loser-pays, simplify the processes of IP enforcement to curb abuses, and develop a framework for AI that serves both creators and the public. Deleting all IP law is like banning free speech to stop misinformation – it might narrowly accomplish its goal, but only by destroying what we ought to be protecting.

America’s global leadership has never been based on low-cost labor or mass-produced conformity – it has been rooted in unmatched innovation. IP protections, grounded in the Constitution, are part of the bedrock of that success. The Trump administration should defend our intellectual property interests abroad, not weaken them at home.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

The single most important pro-growth policy change in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” may not be in the tax title House Ways and Means has been working on, but in the work of the House Judiciary Committee, which has included a version of the REINS Act in its section of the bill.

Federal regulation now nearly rivals taxation as a burden on the U.S. economy, totaling north of $3 trillion per year. Recent Democratic administrations have stretched decades-old laws to within inches of their breaking points to impose vast costs, with Biden setting a new world record of about $47,000 per family in new regulatory costs during his four-year term. Much of that has already been reversed by President Trump – but absent a legislative fix, it can snap back into place, and more, as soon as a Democrat is back in the White House.

The REINS Act would stop the swinging of this exorbitant regulatory pendulum by fixing the Congressional Review Act’s fundamental design flaw. Right now, even if Congress votes to overturn a harmful regulation, a sitting president can veto it and keep the rule in place. This fix flips the default.

Going forward, any regulation with a budgetary impact would require affirmative approval from both the House and Senate before it could take effect. The language is similar to the note Tea Party activist Lloyd Rogers handed to then-Congressman Geoff Davis back in 2010, when the REINS Act was invented.

Congress is more than capable of approving stupid regulations, of course, but this system would put a critical check on the process and would likely stop most of the worst and most destructive regulations. At a minimum, when bad rules and regulations do pass, voters would know who to hold responsible on election day.

This is precisely the legislative process the Constitution describes – regulations significant enough to have an impact on the federal budget would be treated like laws, and would require majority approval of the House and Senate and a presidential signature or a veto-override before they could take effect.

This would unleash economic growth and likely slash the federal deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next decade, according to research from Heritage Foundation. Democrats will be hard-pressed to argue that deficit reduction on that order of magnitude is not germane to a budget reconciliation package, which will procedurally protect it from filibuster.

I asked President Donald Trump about the REINS concept in 2015, when I surveyed the presidential field on the issue.

“I will sign the REINS Act should it reach my desk as president and more importantly I will work hard to get it passed,” Trump responded. “The monstrosity that is the federal government with its pages and pages of rules and regulations has been a disaster for the American economy and job growth. The REINS Act is one major step toward getting our government under control.”

And, I would add, keeping it under control after President Trump has left office.

The REINS Act has passed the House many times but never the Senate. Including it in this year’s reconciliation package is a brilliant move by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to get it over the line. It deserves the strong support of every member of Congress who is up to the job of actually voting on major regulations. And anybody not up to that job should probably seek other employment.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are at it again, hawking their “Loan Shark Prevention Act” with a shiny new 10% APR cap. Worse, they each have a Republican joined up – Josh Hawley of Missouri in the Senate and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida in the House.

This quartet is pitching their proposal as a lifeline for the little guy – protection from greedy bankers and payday vultures. It’s really a sledgehammer to destroy private credit, a backdoor to government dependency, and a betrayal of the very people it claims to save.

Conservatives need to wake up before they accidentally cheerlead this disaster.

Suppose you could get a $1,000 loan for a month that would cost you $10. That’s an amazing bargain at 1% interest. But annualize that to APR and suddenly it’s above Bernie and AOC’s magic 10% line. Their bill effectively bans any monthly interest north of 0.8%. If a circumstance arises outside of your control and you need a short-term loan, there may be no legal options left. Just like that, “loan shark prevention” becomes “loan shark promotion.”

If all interest rates are annualized and capped at 10%, legitimate lenders stampede out the door. Why lend to anyone with a scratch on their credit when the return is gutted? It’s way too easy to end up losing money when defaults rise. Many would-be borrowers – single moms, gig workers, the working poor – get nada.

Studies bear this out. After South Dakota’s 36% cap, small-dollar loans vanished, shoving folks to loan sharks charging 100% or more. At 10%, it’s worse. Credit cards? Gone. Private lending? Toast.

The obsession with annualized interest rates creates more confusion than clarity. It’s not even consistently applied. Payday loans using a linearized APR under the Truth in Lending Act calculated by dividing the finance charge by the loan amount and multiplying it by 365 divided by the number of days in the loan term. This formula turns a $15 fee on a two-week $100 payday loan into a 390% horror show. Calculated like credit card APRs, with daily compounding over a year, that same loan would have an APR over 4,000%. But it’s still just $15.

It’s the annualized abstractions that spook people. Sanders and AOC wield them like a club, knowing big numbers trigger outrage.

Some religious conservatives hear “usury” and picture Ezekiel 18:8’s righteous man shunning interest. But the Bible’s concern is exploitation – crushing widows with debt traps – not a modest fee for a loan that keeps the lights on. This 10% annualized interest cap isn’t biblical justice; it’s a distortion of it.

There is a conservative ideal of everyone living with their means. But circumstances of life often make that impossible. Recent survey data shows that as many as two-thirds of Americans generally live paycheck-to-paycheck, and most use credit cards to fill in the gaps.

Any conservative tempted to join Bernie and AOC should be clear-eyed about the endgame: their bill kills private lending — and that’s the point.

Their real play is postal banking: turn the post office into a state-run credit mill, dishing out ultra-low-interest loans with taxpayers backstopping losses. Step two? Forgive it all come election time. Biden’s already erased $160 billion in student debt; now imagine that for every car loan and cash advance. It’s not compassion – it’s a vote-buying machine, funded by you. Centralize credit under Uncle Sam, kill off banks and credit unions, and wave goodbye to market choice.

The Republican cosponsors are handing Sanders and AOC the rope to hang free markets. Yes, credit card rates can sting, but they are voluntary and, when used responsibly, short-term. They can provide a lifeline for the borrowers banks wouldn’t touch otherwise.

Kill the 10% cap before it kills credit. If we don’t stop it, we’re headed towards post office loan windows and a forgiveness circus every four years.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

The clock is ticking. If Congress fails to act, the average American household will see their tax bill jump by over $3,000 at the end of this year.

The economic imperative is also a political imperative for Republicans, who campaigned on keeping taxes low, along with deregulation and spending restraint as components of a strong economic growth agenda. But as the calendar turns to March, House and Senate Republicans are still on totally different pages. They need to come together as soon as possible on a tax deal that is both immediate and permanent.

The House budget resolution follows the president’s preference for a big, beautiful bill that would enact the president’s full agenda, including a fulsome extension of his first-term tax cuts. The Senate passed a budget resolution with no tax provisions at all, while calling the House version inadequate because it would enable an extension of 7 to 10 years, but not permanent.

Both sides are half right – the Senate is correct the extension should be permanent, which is critical to encourage investment and growth. Toward that end, the Senate is also right that the tax bill should be scored against a “current policy” baseline that views letting the 2017 bill expire as a tax hike rather than extending it as a tax cut. But the House is right that this is an urgent matter and punting until later in the year will have serious adverse economic and political consequences.

The Senate’s advocacy of a current policy baseline is crucial and well precedented. Like the Trump tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts were originally passed on a temporary basis. They were extended another two years in 2010 before being made mostly permanent in 2012. This was the key argument from the Obama administration in favor of a permanent extension:

“The relevant point of comparison isn’t current law, it is ‘current policy’ – those policies that were in place on December 31st, the day before all of these changes were scheduled to take effect. Different organizations, ranging from the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission to the House Budget Committee, have considered this current policy baseline to be the appropriate reference point, since it measures changes relative to the status quo.”

It has now been nearly eight years since President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. If it were allowed to expire, every taxpayer would feel a tax hike. Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo has correctly established following the Obama precedent and using the “current policy” baseline as the Senate Republican position.

Unfortunately, House Republicans are not there yet. Their budget uses a conventional Congressional Budget Office baseline, even though the agency has been wildly wrong on the budgetary impact of the Trump tax cuts. As Art Laffer has demonstrated, those tax cuts paid for themselves in the first two years.

This decision likely constrains the House budget to only a temporary extension, about which Senate Republicans have said: “we will not support a tax package that only provides temporary relief from tax hikes.”

That makes some sense as a negotiating position – except that the Senate just passed a budget that includes zero tax cuts! None at all. That’s too risky. Punting means it might never get done, and every delay creates uncertainty and economic harm.

The House and Senate should put the best parts of their different strategies together and move forward on a big, beautiful bill including permanent Trump tax cuts. And do it immediately.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

The housing crisis and subsequent financial crisis in 2008 was caused in large part by politicizing loan eligibility criteria, advancing social justice objectives over sound economics. Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law added even more politicization by creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has raised costs and pushed many financial services beyond the reach of the consumers it purports to protect.

The agency was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren and the top demand of the liberal advocacy groups funded, ironically, by the billionaire inventor of toxic subprime negative-amortization mortgages, Herb Sandler. It was designed to be the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the federal government. All power was concentrated in one director with a fixed five-year term and not subject to removal by the president. There was no budgetary oversight from Congress, with the agency funded by Federal Reserve profits, and no meaningful limits on what it could regulate.

Fifteen years later we can judge the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by its results. The number of banks in America, according to the FDIC, has plummeted from 7,500 to 4,500, with regulatory compliance costs falling disproportionately on smaller banks that have been forced to merge into the big guys or go out of business. The St. Louis Fed calculated that small banks have triple the regulatory compliance burden of big banks.

So much for punishing Wall Street.

The bureau’s mortgage disclosure rules haven’t made buying a house any easier or less financially risky – but they have added to the pile of paperwork and substantially increased closing costs. The $25 billion “robo-signing” settlement, for instance, sent at most 6 percent of the total proceeds to victims. Probably less. And the settlement resulted in many mortgages being sold to non-banks with little expertise and lots of incompetence.

A lot of the money the bureau collects in fines and fees ends up in a slush fund called the Civil Penalty Fund to be funneled to left-wing social justice groups.

The agency even tried to do the one thing Congress expressly prohibited it from doing – regulate auto-lending. This bizarre and extremely expensive regulation was overturned by a Congressional Review Act resolution in Trump’s first term, but it was an early example of weaponized wokeness, using a computer model to guess the race of borrowers based on their last names and zip codes and then punishing auto dealers for computer-simulated racial discrimination.

Under Biden, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau kicked its regulatory activities into hyperdrive. They banned arbitration clauses to open up vast new opportunities for trial lawyer class-action lawsuits. They banned short-term lenders from setting up automated repayments – with a substantial negative effect on the availability of short-term loans that forced people who could no longer qualify for loans to instead overdraw their checking accounts or incur credit card late fees. Then they tried to regulate overdraft fees and credit card late fees.

This chain of regulating everything might sound good, until you realize that this is precisely why small banks are disappearing and big banks are increasingly putting fees on everything. Good luck finding a free checking account anymore if you don’t carry a hefty balance. The result is a two-tier banking system, and those struggling financially are getting denied access to more and more critical financial services.

Fortunately, the agency’s unaccountable structure is also its Achilles heel. The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the provision that said the president can’t fire the bureau’s director is unconstitutional, and Trump has swiftly fired Biden’s director, Rohit Chopra, and installed Russ Vought as the interim director.

The lack of any funding from Congress allowed Vought to inform the Federal Reserve that the agency’s funding draw for next quarter is zero dollars. Economist EJ Antoni points out that since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is supposed to be funded by Fed profits, and the Fed has been operating at a huge loss, the agency legally must be zero-funded. So Vought is on firm ground.

Congress should also do its part, ideally by formally repealing the agency, but Democrats are likely to filibuster. What they can’t filibuster are Congressional Review Act resolutions, which are privileged and can permanently repeal the agency’s most expensive and destructive midnight regulations from last year.

Whatever rules Congress doesn’t repeal, Vought should formally rescind. And then close up shop.

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Copyright 2025 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].

Vice President Kamala Harris is touting the Inflation Reduction Act, for which she cast the tiebreaking vote, as a signature achievement of the Biden-Harris Administration. Her proof point: through the legislation’s government-enforced “negotiations” on ten popular drugs, seniors will pay $1.5 billion less on prescription drugs, but not until 2026.

With sixty-seven million people enrolled in Medicare, $1.5 billion in savings is about 20 bucks a year if averaged across all beneficiaries – an amount dwarfed by the same law’s other provisions. Many are already paying monthly premium increases that are now equal to the annual savings they are waiting for in 2026.

The Inflation Reduction Act raids an estimated $260 billion in reduced Medicare drug spending to pay for unrelated spending, including tax credits for electric vehicles, massive subsidies paid to big health insurers, Obamacare subsidies for illegal immigrants, and other wasteful handouts to wind and solar companies and other corporate friends of the Democratic Party. It is a highly dubious proposition that we can spend that much less on drugs without seniors getting fewer drugs, including less innovative new cures and treatments. Even if it is possible, we should all be able to agree that the money should have been kept in Medicare to shore up its finances or passed on to seniors instead of being spent by politicians.

Older Americans already have their average monthly Medicare Part D premiums skyrocketing 20 percent or more – some near 50 percent in some states. And due to the Inflation Reduction Act, nearly two million seniors could soon be kicked off their current drug plans as providers flee the market in droves. All told, there are now fewer drug plans, options, and benefits to choose from than ever over the last decade. Additionally, big insurers have become even more aggressive with prior authorizations and are warning of new access restrictions to critical treatments.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services was forced to report the Inflation Reduction Act was causing monthly premium costs for two million seniors with standalone Part D plans to increase by 179 percent. Knowing seniors would revolt leading in an election year, the Biden administration is trying to paper over this disaster by creating a three-year “demonstration” project to mask those costs by raiding the Medicare Trust Fund to pay off big insurers with billions in new additional subsidies, estimated at $5 billion per year.

On the one hand, seniors have the potential $1.5 billion in 2026 savings. On the other hand, we have the original $260 billion raid on Medicare as a piggy bank for unrelated spending and the second raid of $15 billion to keep Part D from collapsing before the election (three years times $5 billion).

In fairness, this does not include caps on insulin and some vaccines, many of which were first adopted by the preceding Trump administration. Nor does it count the billions in higher Medicare Part D premiums and inflation-fueled prices for everything older Americans are now paying. However, there is no way those factors balance out in favor of seniors.

The Inflation Reduction Act was not the historic achievement its proponents and the media, like the insurer-funded AARP (which gets paid more than $1.5 billion from UnitedHealth alone every two years), marketed it to America’s seniors. It was and is a massive government spending bill that rewarded spend-happy politicians, gave bureaucrats vast new powers over patients and their doctors, enriched and enlarged a handful of giant corporate health conglomerates, and stuck seniors in Medicare, future retirees, and taxpayers with the bill.

As Vice President, Kamala Harris was sitting in the presiding officer’s chair of the US Senate to cast the tiebreaking vote that allowed the Inflation Reduction Act to pass. And unlike her backflips on many issues, she continues to tout it as an achievement. That leaves it to voters and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to do what she refuses to do: address the legislation’s catastrophic failures.

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Copyright 2024 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Phil Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at [email protected].