DOE Taps 10 Advanced Reactor Companies For Expedited Nuclear Pilot

 By Robert Walton of Utility Dive,

Summary:

• The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday selected 11 advanced reactor projects to participate in a nuclear pilot program that aims to expedite deployment without Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, according to a June request for applications.

• DOE wants to achieve criticality of at least three test reactors using an expedited authorization process by July 4, 2026.

• Oklo and its Atomic Alchemy subsidiary were selected to develop three of the projects. DOE “is opening the door to the market so new ideas, new approaches, and new designs can be built more quickly and efficiently,” Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte said in a statement.

DOE unveiled its reactor pilot program in June, building on a May executive order signed by President Donald Trump that reformed reactor testing. The program aims to expedite testing of reactor designs authorized by DOE and located outside of the national laboratories.

DOE cited the Atomic Energy Act’s authorization of reactors under the agency’s “sufficient control,” in authorizing the pilot.

“Reactors built and operated pursuant to the DOE pilot program will not require Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing,” the June request for applications said. “Nevertheless, DOE-approved reactor designs can and will be fast tracked for future NRC licensing. ... [The pilot will] provide a fast track to an NRC license, and hence, commercialization for authorized reactor design.”

DOE on Tuesday named 10 companies that could access a “fast-tracked approach to future commercial licensing activities.” They are: Aalo Atomics; Antares Nuclear; Atomic Alchemy; Deep Fission; Last Energy; Oklo; Natura Resources; Radiant Industries; Terrestrial Energy; and Valar Atomics.

Each company will be responsible for all costs associated with designing, manufacturing, constructing, operating, and decommissioning their test reactors, the DOE said. 

“Seeking DOE authorization provided under the Atomic Energy Act will help today’s selected companies ... unlock private funding and provide a fast-tracked approach to future commercial licensing activities,” it said in a release.

DOE Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly said in a statement that the agency will “do everything we can” to support the companies’ aim of “safely” achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.

“This shows that the DOE is ushering in a new era of building new nuclear in America by unleashing its unique capabilities to enable American nuclear innovators to build,” Oklo’s DeWitte said. “DOE’s selection of a number of projects provides a sweeping injection of urgency to meet the moment.”

DOE tapped Oklo for two projects and its subsidiary, Atomic Alchemy, was selected for a third. Oklo completed its acquisition of the radioisotope producer in March.

While nuclear boosters have hailed DOE’s pilot program, critics say the lack of NRC licensing requirements creates safety risks. 

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in May criticized the White House’s plan to move nuclear reactor siting, licensing and fuel supply for some projects outside the NRC.

“By fatally compromising the independence and integrity of the NRC, and by encouraging pathways for nuclear deployment that bypass the regulator entirely, the Trump administration is virtually guaranteeing that this country will see a serious accident or other radiological release that will affect the health, safety and livelihoods of millions,” Lyman said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/doe-taps-10-advanced-reactor-companies-expedited-nuclear-pilot

America's Bet on AI

The rise of artificial intelligence is the single most important trend of our time. The changes it will wreak on human life eclipse not only all other contemporary technological developments, but also any since the Industrial Revolution. The new pope recognizes its salience, choosing as his regnal name “Leo XIV,” because just as Leo XIII was confronted with the social change from the Industrial Revolution, he seeks to confront the even more dramatic change from AI.


Breakthroughs happen monthly now. OpenAI’s o3 model recently scored higher than 99.8 percent of competitive programmers—while the same lab’s Sora engine, launched in February and now being integrated into ChatGPT, can already generate minute-long, high-definition video from text. In July, frontier models from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI sat the International Mathematical Olympiad under the same four-and-a-half-hour rules given to the world’s brightest teens, solved five of the six problems, and earned gold medals. In April, a University at Buffalo team unveiled Semantic Clinical AI (SCAI), an architecture that grafts formal medical knowledge onto a large language model. SCAI scored as high as 95 percent on Step 3 of the US Medical Licensing Examination—better than most practicing physicians and ahead of every previous AI benchmark—showing that well-structured retrieval can turn AI into a skilled general diagnostician.

AI’s new methodological phase is the emergence of AI agents, systems that autonomously execute sequences of tasks in pursuit of a goal. This phase is called agentic AI, which builds on Large Language Models (LLMs) that have dominated AI in the last few years. Those LLMs are neural networks that understand the relation of words in text and can use that understanding to generate competent, even expert, answers on every subject.

Agentic AI marries the predictive eloquence of LLM to an institutional framework of memory, goal-seeking, and tool use. No longer confined to completing sentences, the system can now formulate a purpose, decompose it into ordered tasks, engage external software, monitor its own performance, and revise its course when it makes mistakes. In short, where the LLM offers fluent speech, the agentic overlay supplies the infrastructure necessary for transforming mere words into coordinated action. One way of measuring progress in agentic AI is the uninterrupted duration of its competent autonomy at human tasks.

A year ago: a few minutes spent sorting e-mail, drafting a paragraph of code, or a short speech.

Now: twenty to thirty minutes in which Deep Search on ChatGPT and other similar services produces memos on any subject. As Tyler Cowen observes, the answers “wipes [sic] the floor against any humans, pretty much across the board.”

By 2026–27: several hours, during which an agent can redesign a software module, or plan a fortnight of coordination for a business.

As the decade closes: days or even weeks, in which an agent may conceive a research project, run simulations, draft the article, and submit it for peer review.

Because of its current and future power, progress in AI has become a central national concern. For example, AI may offer a solution to the intractable fiscal situation in which the United States finds itself. The United States’ national debt stands at approximately 120 percent of gross domestic product. And it is rising since we are also running an annual deficit of about 6 percent a year. Neither party offers any solution to the problem. The Republican Party just renewed the tax cuts of Trump’s first term and added more without compensating cuts to the budget. When the Democrats were last in power, they added programs and government spending that also added to the budget deficit. Neither party provides plausible reforms to the middle-class entitlements that drive future deficits in an aging population. Both are committed not to raise taxes on any but the top two percent, which is completely insufficient to curb deficits and debt. The result is a sea of red ink as far as an economist can project.

Given the fiscal plight and political constraints, the only solution is sharply increased economic growth. AI provides the most plausible engine for that growth. As a general-purpose technology, like electricity, it can make almost every human enterprise more efficient. In business enterprises, AI can match output to demand in real time and trim the staffing once required to execute routine tasks. In medicine, it can help deliver correct diagnoses faster with fewer people. In my own field of law, it can draft contracts and briefs with human lawyers just doing the work of tweaking and revising.

In geopolitics as well, AI offers both opportunity and danger. If the West wins the AI race, it will be in a better economic and military position, particularly given that the battle will now be fought with AI technology—both to surveil the enemy and to launch attacks and create defensive shields. But if China gains mastery before the United States, it could replace it as the global superpower.


These three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models.

As a result of AI’s centrality, the Trump administration has created “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” encompassing three companion executive orders issued on July 23. Together, they erect a federal legal architecture for artificial intelligence that seeks to secure US primacy by accelerating innovation, expanding infrastructure, and projecting American standards abroad. The plan sets out more than ninety actions, from specific regulatory sandboxes encouraging innovation at the FDA and SEC to a more general revision of federal rules that “unduly burden AI innovation,” all premised on the proposition that prosperity and power in the twenty-first century will flow to the nation that commands the AI frontier.

The plan recognizes that AI will succeed in rapidly increasing economic growth only if it is not stymied by bottlenecks. It has substantial demands for computational infrastructure and the energy needed to power that infrastructure. Indeed, one way to think of AI is that it converts electricity into intelligence without the biological constraints on such conversion in humans. But electricity generation faces regulatory constraints.

As such, the first executive order in Trump’s bundle, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” attacks the bottleneck of the computational power needed for AI. It aims to shave years off construction times for the facilities needed for frontier model training by creating exclusions to environmental regulations for AI infrastructure. Cheaper and faster computing is the indispensable fuel of the AI age. Thus, unclogging permits promises to liberate AI progress.

This executive order aids AI development more by deregulation than subsidization. The promise of AI is so powerful that the efficient capital market ecosystem is sufficient to supply funds. The roadblock is government regulation. Thus, the focus of the executive order is to ease the regulations that may block its smooth development.

The second executive order, “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack,” turns US economic strength outward. A new American AI Exports Program authorizes the Commerce and State Departments to finance and shepherd “full-stack” AI packages, including chips, models, software, and cyber safeguards, to trusted allies. Wiring friendly nations with American technology locks in governance norms, buoyant markets, deepens supply-chain reliance on US firms, and denies strategic rent to adversaries.

Thus, the second order is designed to deploy AI to strengthen our international alliances. For all the talk of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, this executive order at least indicates the administration recognizes the importance of bringing allied nations within the ambit of America’s growing AI technology network. In the Cold War, the United States strengthened and integrated the West in two principal ways. First, it placed much of the West under a US security umbrella through NATO, additional multilateral pacts, and a web of bilateral alliances. Second, it was a principal mover in international trade agreements, like the GATT, which encompassed most Western nations and sought to tie them together economically. But today, the rise of AI makes our AI technological network the essential mechanism of integration and strength. And it is not Russia that is the principal challenger, but China.

As Dario Amodei (creator of the Claude Model) puts it in a memo that preceded the executive order:


a coalition [of liberal democracies integrated thought AI] would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.

The third order safeguards viewpoint neutrality. “Preventing Woke AI” bars federal agencies from procuring language models that embed ideological filters, mandating “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” as procurement conditions.

The aim is to make sure that AI does not compromise epistemic understanding by skewing answers to questions ideologically. There have been instances in which AI models seem to provide politically correct or biased answers. For instance, when asked to show a set of Founding Fathers, Gemini initially assembled a multiracial group of images in an obvious gesture to political correctness. Just as the Data Infrastructure executive order avoids subsidies to AI, this order avoids actual legal orders to the AI companies to be ideologically neutral—a matter fraught with First Amendment concerns. But the order does direct the government not to contract with companies that engage in distortions. The government has a substantial, indeed compelling interest, not to have its work distorted by ideological bias.

Taken together, the three executive orders clear the regulatory thickets at home, wire friendly nations into an American-led AI ecosystem abroad, and insist on ideological neutrality in the models the government pays for. If the bet pays off, long after the daily controversies of the Trump administration are forgotten, this set of actions may be remembered as the most important set of executive orders in the history of the American government’s relation with science.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University and a Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. His book Accelerating Democracy was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. McGinnis is also the coauthor with Mike Rappaport of Originalism and the Good Constitution published by Harvard University Press in 2013 . He is a graduate of Harvard College, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. He has published in leading law reviews, including the Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford Law Reviews and the Yale Law Journal, and in journals of opinion, including National Affairs and National Review.

https://lawliberty.org/americas-bet-on-ai/

Trump Holds Universities Accountable for Discrimination

 In a memorandum to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon last Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that for the first time, universities receiving federal financial assistance will be required to report data on applicants, admits, and enrollees by race to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The memorandum, entitled “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions,” is the Trump administration’s latest and most comprehensive effort to enforce Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions. These data are expected to include students’ GPAs and standardized test scores, which will be pivotal to assess compliance with the ruling. Going forward, both the government and American families will be able to point to these data to show evidence of potential discrimination.

“It should not take years of legal proceedings, and millions of dollars in litigation fees, to elicit data from tax-payer funded institutions that identifies whether they are discriminating against hardworking American applicants,” said McMahon in a press release. “We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments.”

Over the last two years, universities have gone above and beyond to evade the Court’s ruling. They’ve added racially coded essay prompts to their applications, eliminated standardized testing requirements, and incorporated racial proxies, such as whether a student comes from a single-parent household, as considerations in the admissions process.

Some institutions have been strikingly bold in their defiance. Take, for example, Johns Hopkins University, which in the 2023-2024 admissions cycle asked applicants to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at Hopkins.”

Why did America’s elite universities believe that they could discriminate against white and Asian students with impunity, even in the face of a Supreme Court decision to the contrary? The answer is twofold.

First, universities correctly inferred that the Biden-Harris administration, which was in office when Fair Admissions was handed down, would ignore it. Former President Joe Biden, responding to the ruling, urged universities to give “serious consideration to the adversities that students have overcome,” such as “personal experiences of hardship or discrimination, including racial discrimination.” Kamala Harris, for her part, described Fair Admissions as “a step backward for our nation.”

Second, universities grew used to the idea, largely popularized by the courts, that they were owed complete deference in the selection of their student bodies. Their sense of entitlement can be traced back to 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the first case in which the Supreme Court examined the constitutionality of a university’s affirmative action program. Here, Justice Lewis Powell, in a plurality opinion, noted that, because “it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation,” institutions of higher education are entitled to certain freedoms, one of which is the freedom to decide “who may be admitted to study.” Inherent in this freedom, he argued, was the option of considering race as “one factor among many” in the admissions process, since “speculation, experiment, and creation” are “widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body.”

Twenty-five years later, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor endorsed Powell’s view in her majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. In that case, the Supreme Court considered a challenge to the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy, which treated the race of underrepresented minority applicants as a “plus factor.” Five justices voted to uphold the controversial policy, crediting judicial deference as the reason for their decision: “Our conclusion that the law school has a compelling interest in a diverse student body is informed by our view that attaining a diverse student body is at the heart of the law school’s proper institutional mission, and that ‘good faith’ on the part of a university is ‘presumed’ absent ‘a showing to the contrary.’”

Of course, there had been a showing to the contrary in Grutter. O’Connor herself cited testimony from the dean of the law school that acknowledged that black and Latino applicants were often admitted with lower GPAs and LSAT scores than their white and Asian peers.

In 2016’s Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, the Supreme Court once again ignored evidence of anti-white and anti-Asian prejudice in admissions because it didn’t want to police how universities chose their students. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in Fisher, explained that “a university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness.’” Accordingly, “considerable deference,” he contended, “is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.”

Only in Fair Admissions did the Supreme Court refuse to give universities the benefit of the doubt. In a landmark opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “The universities’ main response to these criticisms is ‘trust us.’ They assert that universities are owed deference when using race to benefit some applicants but not others. While this Court has recognized a ‘tradition of giving a degree of deference to a university’s academic decisions,’ it has made clear that deference must exist ‘within constitutionally prescribed limits.’” Discriminating against Asian applicants for the grave sin of being Asian is, apparently, outside those limits.

And now President Trump and his Domestic Policy Council are holding universities accountable. One day after returning to office, Trump signed an executive order that directed the Departments of Justice and Education jointly to enforce Fair Admissions, including the decision’s ban on racial proxies. Just last month, the administration told Columbia and Brown that their federal funding would be restored only after they agreed to disclose data, disaggregated by race, on applicants, admits, and enrollees. These agreements seemingly served as the blueprint for Trump’s August 7 memorandum.

This work builds on Trump’s efforts in the last term. In 2018, for instance, the Department of Justice investigated a complaint, filed during the second Obama administration by a coalition of 130 Asian American groups, that accused Yale of penalizing Asian students in undergraduate admissions. Among other things, DOJ found that the acceptance rate for black applicants in the top academic decile was 60 percent; for Asian applicants, it was 14 percent. The administration subsequently filed a lawsuit against the Ivy—which Biden rescinded two weeks after entering office.

In September 2024, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “short of a presidential administration willing to hold their feet to the fire,” not much would keep universities from continuing to discriminate on the basis of race. President Trump and his team have proven to be that administration.

Renu Mukherjee is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-admissions-data-memo-universities-race-discrimination

It’s Time to Federalize Washington, D.C.

 “This is a safe city, but overhearing and witnessing gang threats and then watching the camera footage of the thuggery is disturbing,” a resident of the nation’s capital told the Washington Post over the weekend—an interview that was given on condition of anonymity citing safety concerns. In both its content and the request for anonymity, the statement recalls D.C. mayor Marion S. Barry’s infamous suggestion that if one did not count all the murders, Washington’s crime rate under his disastrous mayoralty was not so very high.

Barry has a statue dedicated to his memory in downtown Washington, but another local politician takes a different view. “If DC doesn’t get its act together, and quickly,” President Donald J. Trump declared on his Truth Social platform last week, “we will have no choice but to take federal control of the city … If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this city.”

On Monday, Trump took a strong step in that direction, invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 to declare an emergency, take control of the city’s police department, and deploy the District’s National Guard, which is uniquely under federal command. This followed the temporary, seven-day deployment of federal law enforcement officers from multiple agencies, including the FBI, ICE, ATF, the U.S. Park Police, the Capitol Police, and the Secret Service, across the city to address crime.

Washington hews heavily anti-Trump, with more than 90 percent of its vote going to Democrats, and even its small community of Republicans favored Nikki Haley in her primary challenge to Trump in last year’s race for the GOP presidential nomination. His critics there are naturally aghast, though their opposition curiously sounds like they are defending their city’s high crime rate and urban blight—which ultimately victimize and degrade many of them—rather than accept that as of this week they will be considerably safer than they were under incompetent Democratic government.

It takes a special kind of progressive to deny that Washington is a mess. So far this year, according to data released by the city’s police department last week, the nation’s capital has suffered 99 murders, 530 assaults with a deadly weapon, and 888 armed robberies. As appalling as these statistics are, they represent a 26 percent decline in violent crimes over the 2024 figure. The year before that, 2023, was D.C.’s worst year for violent crime since the 1990s. According to data from Congress, D.C. local government, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, from 2019 to 2024 Washington’s homicide rate—still the nation’s fourth highest this year despite the recent decline in violent crime—soared to 41 per 100,000 inhabitants. Baghdad’s murder rate, by comparison, was 15.2 over the same period. Lagos, Nigeria’s was 15.1. Bogota’s was 11.

While this year’s baseline for violent crimes is still so awful that it should be totally unacceptable in any country’s capital city, Washington’s property crime rates have barely changed, with auto thefts, unarmed robberies, burglaries, vandalism, and arson holding close to steady from previous years. General urban blight—graffiti, litter, homelessness, petty street harassment, and other unsightly and unpleasant features of what could be a great city—remain present and pervasive.

In recent years, moreover, violent crime in Washington has crossed class divisions , with victims now regularly including white collar professionals, federal government employees, and even members of Congress. In June, Congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was murdered in what appears to have been gang war crossfire. Earlier this month, Edward Coristine, a former DOGE official now working for the Social Security Administration, was severely beaten by a crowd of assailants while resisting a carjacking. In 2023, Democratic Congresswoman Angie Craig was assaulted in the elevator of her building on Capitol Hill, while Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by armed assailants in Navy Yard, an area now known for its entertainment and nightlife. Violent crimes are also increasingly committed by teenagers, who in D.C.’s legal system can only be temporarily detained until age 21 with their identities protected—even when convicted of murder.

 In February, Trump mentioned taking over the capital for the first time since he returned to office and has flexed federal muscle in recent months. In March, he ordered D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser to begin removing homeless encampments, a phenomenon virtually unknown in the capital before 2020, and he achieved some results, although the problem remains. On Sunday, he announced that he would remove all homeless people from the capital and eliminate crime there applying forceful measures comparable to those employed at the border. Jeanine Pirro, his newly confirmed U.S. Attorney for D.C., has begun lobbying D.C. government to scale back laws mandating light prosecutions even for violent crimes and limiting criminal sanctions for juvenile offenders.

Trump has also mentioned repealing the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973, which granted limited self-government to the national capital after 182 years of being managed by the federal government, as provided by Article I of the Constitution. Theoretically, majority votes by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate should be enough to end Home Rule in this way, and in February Utah Senator Mike Lee and Georgia Congressman Andy Ogles introduced legislation to repeal it. There may be legal challenges, and many of Washington’s 700,000 residents will undoubtedly complain, presumably even while dodging bullets or deluding themselves that living in the leafy and overwhelmingly white upmarket neighborhoods of the capital’s Northwest quadrant will protect themeven under the dismal current order. The pre-1973 status quo, however, would improve the dire situation into which Washington has tumbled.

“Washington DC must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the world to see,” Trump concluded his post while looking ahead to a summit meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. On Sunday, he added “I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.” The president’s powers are extensive but working with Congress can help him complete the worthy project of federalizing Washington after 52 years of leftist failure.

Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/its-time-to-federalize-washington-d-c/

SNAP ban on soda aligns with public opinion

 This week, during a “Great American Farmers Market,” United States Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed waivers allowing six states — West Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas — to restrict the use of SNAP benefits for soda and candy. These join six others — Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah — that have already had waivers signed this year. 

The waivers usher in a new, if complicated, era in food policy. As states across the country, from Swig-guzzling Utah to the Mountain (Dew) state of West Virginia, adjust welfare purchasing categories, they highlight questions of health equity and personal responsibility and underscore a fascinating set of paradoxes that define the Trump era.

Paradox one: the legislators moving to restrict the purchasing power of SNAP (i.e., the federal government’s “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program”) are mostly Republicans, but Democrats have historically been more willing to use the so-called “nanny state” to shape dietary behavior. (Think of Michael Bloomberg pushing for similar restrictions as mayor of New York.) Republicans, by contrast, have often leaned libertarian on interference in individual consumption choices.

Another paradoxical twist: on the one hand, taking soda off SNAP seems traditionally Republican, insofar as it limits what taxpayer dollars can fund, and promotes personal responsibility. After all, it’s not saying the poor can’t have soda; just that they should buy it with their own hard-earned money, reflecting “Yankee work ethic” conservatism.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/3497822/snap-ban-on-soda-aligns-with-public-opinion/

Expect Misleading Headlines About The Big Beautiful Bill Leaving 10 M Americans ‘Uninsured’

 Love it or hate it, the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) opinion carries weight and drives headlines. While much of official Washington is relaxing during Congress’s August recess, the budget gnomes in a spreadsheet finally disclosed their coverage estimates for the budget reconciliation package signed into law on July 4.

Overall, CBO believes that the law will increase the number of uninsured by 10 million as of 2034 — 7.5 million from Medicaid, about 100,000 from Medicare (due solely to a change in eligibility for certain immigrant populations), 2.1 million from the Exchange provisions, and another 300,000 via interactions from the various policies.

In many ways, the estimates amount to a Rorschach test, allowing people to speculate whether, and why, individuals will lose coverage due to the legislation’s new verification requirements. That debate will help to define opinions of the law in the coming years as its provisions take effect.

Work Requirement Verification

The coverage estimates represent a mix of the cautious and the curious. In the former category falls the anticipated impact of work requirements, which CBO says will increase the uninsured by 5.3 million by 2034. Sections regarding eligibility verification (other than work requirements) in Medicaid and the Exchanges will increase the uninsured by 700,000 each, making these three provisions responsible for roughly two-thirds of the coverage losses overall.

Given study results in recent months suggesting that non-working Medicaid recipients spend an average of over six hours per day socializing and engaging in leisure activities, a community engagement requirement for program recipients seems reasonable. The estimates suggest that CBO believes either that many recipients will not comply with the new requirement, or they will get trapped in red tape and lose their coverage for lack of proper documentation (as opposed to not working).

Critics of the law believe the latter will occur much more than the former. But with the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) watching closely, states will have every incentive to implement the work requirements in a prudent fashion. They should make sure beneficiaries’ work and income status get documented without unduly burdening recipients, for instance by utilizing reliable third-party data when available.

Immigration Impact

Immigration represents another source of coverage changes, as the bill limits eligibility for Medicaid, Medicare, and Exchange insurance subsidies. In all three cases, lawful permanent residents, aliens granted the status of Cuban or Haitian entrants, and those subject to the Compact of Free Association represent the only categories of non-citizens eligible for subsidized coverage.

CBO believes these changes will increase the number of uninsured by roughly 1.4 million — 100,000 in Medicaid, 100,000 in Medicare, and 900,000 on the Exchanges. Another 300,000 will lose coverage due to a related provision, which ends a policy from Obamacare that allowed “qualified” aliens who cannot receive Medicaid benefits during a five-year waiting period (established in the 1996 welfare reform law) to receive subsidized Exchange coverage instead.

Individuals of all political stripes may support these provisions as a reasonable attempt to restrict taxpayer-funded coverage to citizens and limited other groups. As I have frequently noted, none other than Hillary Clinton said in September 1993 that “We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country. We know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is. We certainly don’t want them having the same benefits that American citizens are entitled to have.”

Increase in ‘Projected Uninsured?’

A more curious interpretation of the law came from CBO’s estimate of Section 71114 of the new law. This section sunset, effective Jan. 1, 2026, a provision in Democrats’ 2021 Covid spending spree that temporarily increased the federal Medicaid match rate for non-expansion states (like Florida and Texas) should they choose to join the expansion to able-bodied adults.

But Section 71114 didn’t take anything away from anyone, or any state, now — all it did was prevent states from receiving something in the future. The idea that this provision would somehow “increase the uninsured” seems, if not laughable, at least highly speculative. This 100,000 “uninsured” estimate comes from a decrease in the probability that some hypothetical non-expansion state might in some hypothetical future year decide to expand to able-bodied adults.

Most ordinary Americans wouldn’t call this an “increase in the uninsured” by any stretch. Yet CBO categorized it as such and the media will dutifully report the 10 million overall figure without providing granular explanations about where it came from, or some of the dubious assumptions behind it.

As with many policies in Washington, there’s more than meets the eye. Unfortunately, people wanting to use the CBO estimates as a political cudgel may not look, or may not wish to look, past the headline.

Chris Jacobs is founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group and author of the book "The Case Against Single Payer." He is on Twitter: @chrisjacobsHC.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/14/expect-misleading-headlines-about-the-big-beautiful-bill-leaving-10-million-americans-uninsured/

Junk Science on Trial

 The U.S. economy has long depended on innovation; it’s a big part of why we are the most prosperous nation on earth. From Silicon Valley startups to groundbreaking pharmaceutical research, American ingenuity drives growth, creates high-paying jobs, and ensures our global leadership. However, the proliferation of spurious information known as “junk science” puts a damper on the development of new ideas and products, making us less competitive and weaker on the international stage.

 

Legal actions underpinned by junk science are not supported by credible scientific evidence, such as peer-reviewed publications, or by experts with bona fide credentials. Consider the high-profile actions based on claims that cell phone use can cause brain cancer. Emerging rulings that plaintiffs’ experts used flawed methodologies and failed to present reliable scientific evidence to support their claims – in fact, extensive research and large scale studies have found no link between cell phone use and an increased risk of brain tumors or other cancers – shows how jurors ran the risk of being misled by junk science. Unfortunately, not all courts have been as diligent in disallowing testimony to a jury from individuals who may not necessarily be an expert on the subject matter at issue in the case. 

 

Fortunately, the court system has recently addressed the problem of how to determine if a person can qualify to testify as an expert before a jury. The Federal Rule of Evidence 702 (Rule 702) was amended to address the long-standing concern that courts have had traditionally broad discretion as gatekeepers and that some courts have not been vigilant in examining the credentials and testimony of individuals proffered as experts. This abdication of duty by the courts can cause jurors to rely on dubious science that will likely impact the jury’s verdict. 

 

Rule 702 states that an individual who will be testifying as an expert must be qualified and have the scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge to help the court understand the evidence or determine facts that may be at issue. Alternatively, it must be demonstrated to the court that the expert’s testimony is based on sufficient facts or data; is the product of reliable principles and methods; and reflects a reliable application of the principles and methods to the facts of the case.

 

Importantly, the amended Rule clarifies that the party offering an individual as an expert must prove that the testimony is admissible by a preponderance of the evidence. Previously, many courts wrongly presumed that the sufficiency of an individual’s testimony proffered as an expert went to the weight of the evidence, not to its admissibility. Under the newly amended rule this would be incorrect. Unless the person offered as an expert can meet the criteria of admissibility, the testimony is not appropriate and should be denied.   

This is a welcome step forward, as the admission of misleading, scientifically unfounded evidence in litigation exacerbates the negative impacts these cases can have on our economy. One study found that excessive tort costs result in the loss of $473 billion and the elimination of 4.46 million jobs. Taking that kind of money out of the general economy cripples investments in innovation and new product development.

 

It can also take a toll on the patient-doctor relationship and cause dwindling consumer trust in evaluating what products are safe. Frequent targets of these claims based on junk science are legal actions that include companies engaged in manufacturing and health care delivery, crucial industries for not only economic growth but also the provision of essential products and services. Any proliferation of misinformation can send consumers down a never-ending rabbit hole over which products are safe to use.

 

This erosion of trust also extends beyond manufacturers to healthcare providers, who are forced to spend more time trying to address allegations found in television commercials. Unfounded claims in advertisements based on junk science erode public confidence in medicine, and cause individuals to become increasingly susceptible to fear-based legal ads disguised as health advocacy. In this cycle, consumers lose faith, not only in products, but in the once-trusted entities meant to protect their well-being, including their own doctors.

 

The amendments to Rule 702 and the emphasis to address issues concerning expert testimony is an encouraging step to eliminate junk science in the courtroom. As such, courts should be diligent in applying the amended rule to ensure that verdicts are fair and appropriate.

 

Vickie Yates Brown Glisson is the former secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2025/08/14/junk_science_on_trial_1128881.html