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Popping filter bubbles and picking up the Tuna Cans.
None of these stories on their own really warrant a top level post but taken together I feel like they both illustrate a trend and serve as a coda to my January post on "Tuna Cans" and how the Trump administration might be able to more effectively deliver on it's campaign promise to combat Immigration.
Last week the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding a 2022 rule that prohibited US Customs and Immigration Services from considering an immigrant's use of Medicaid and other public benefits when deciding whether or not to renew their visa or grant them legal resident status. The usual suspects at NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Et Al are trotting out their usual tripe about "women and minorities hardest hit" but to me the most galling thing is that this rule existed in the first place, and that it wasn't quashed a year and a half ago. That said, while the best time to plant a tree (or repeal a bad law) is 20 years ago, doing it now is still something worthy of praise.
In the wake of Nick Shirley's expeditions to Minneapolis and LA, the Department of Health and Human Services has that announced that 199 million dollars a year allocated to the state of Minnesota and 860 million dollars a year allocated to the state of California has been frozen pending those states provide positive evidence that individuals and business originally slated to receive those funds actually exist and are not just a PO-box in a strip mall somewhere.
At the same time Vice President JD Vance and Interim Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced a "crack-down" on H1B visa fraud four days after Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 4,800 employees while simultaneously applying for permission to import over 2,000 foreign workers.
Meanwhile Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to quietly do his job, announcing that the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial drivers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language proficiency requirements that had been relaxed by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx under Obama back in 2016. The American Trucking Association is naturally angry about this complaining that the constricting workforce coupled with proposed crack-downs on "chameleon carriers" and rulings like Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".
Again I reiterate my position that more often than not it isn't the big headline grabbing stories that have the greatest impact but rather the things that happen quietly behind the scenes and that is why I feel obliged to signal-boost these sorts of stories.
I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?
For instance, with the English language requirements for the trucking licenses, they were in power from 2017-2021 and could have done it then, and they could have done it last year too. Are they too busy? Do they not know about the regulations until someone brings it to their attention? Is it very difficult to change regulations like these and therefore they wait for an opportune time to do it?
I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."
Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.
I have been wondering: for all the drama going on with frontier AI models in the world of digital security, I have to think there are some interesting red-team/blue-team ways to apply those to laws and regulations. Some of the big lawfare shifts we've seen in the last decade or so ("did you know we could just have all the border crossers say the shibboleth asylum and we have to let them in indefinitely until we can give them a hearing?") seem to have come from novel readings or applications of existing rules. It'd be at least interesting (and I haven't tried) to prompt those same models for what corners of the tax code could be abused --- or in reverse, to provide feedback to Congress and regulatory rulemakers --- to promote less-direct outcomes. It's not hard to imagine "hey Claude, let's figure out the most pathological case to bring to trial to make SCOTUS rule my desired direction" actually working.
The problem is less figuring out the ideas to sue over and more building out the necessary infrastructure and legal precedent to get those ideas before the Court. Believe me, there are many, many lawyers already working around the clock to bring these issues before a historically receptive SCOTUS. The thing is, unless you're a state suing another state, you can't just take your case to SCOTUS. It's a multi-year slog of trials and appeals that you have to successfully complete at least 2-3 times (SCOTUS won't hear a case if there isn't a disagreement between at least two circuit courts of appeal) before you even have a shot of getting on their docket. And even then it's a moonshot, with only a tiny percentage of petitions making it to briefing and argument.
The legal activists have good ideas coming out of their ears, but bringing an issue from Zero to SCOTUS, even with the best lawyers in the world working on it, is a ten-year process involving millions of dollars and dozens of skilled professionals working in perfect sync. And those skilled professionals are already making use of AI at least as aggressively as anyone else in the legal field. Maybe there's still some low-hanging fruit that AI can help them more effectively target, some subtle new way of speaking directly to the concerns of five different justices at the same time, but for the most part the bottlenecks are funding and court capacity, not lack of clever strategems.
I think you're right that legal activists aren't really limited by ideas today. But as an example, how will the APA notice and comment regime survive AI-generated slop comments? My understanding is that a lot of it today ends up as boilerplate copy-and-paste letter campaigns: if every commenter writes a unique letter, review will presumably be more involved. Or actively using AI to generate as many novel arguments for/against a proposed rule as possible to exhaust the review process. I'm sure the government side will start using AI to review comments, but I wouldn't expect them to be ahead of the public on their processes.
Require that people who wish to submit a comment do it in person at any post office. The comment has to be recorded on-site with the government supplied equipment, as audio-video, audio only or typed in on a kiosk-mode computer. It wouldn't stop someone reading or retyping AI slop, but it'd slow it down considerably. It would also have the benefit of cutting down the activist spam by requiring a bigger time investment.
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